Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 3. Practical Guidance for Aspiring Writers
Guidance in Writing Poetry

Sri Aurobindo’s Critical Comments on Poetry Written in the Ashram [1]

You seem to demand a very rigid and academic fixity of meaning from my hastily penned comments on the poetry sent to me. I have no unvarying aesthetic standard or fixed qualitative criterion,— not only so but I hold any such thing to be impossible with regard to so subtle and unintellectual an essence as poetry. It is only physical things that can be subjected to fixed measures and unvarying criteria. Appreciation of poetry is a question of feeling, of intuitive perception, of a certain aesthetic sense, it is not the result of an intellectual judgment.

My judgment does differ with different writers and also with different kinds of writing. If I put “very good” on a poem of Shailen’s, it does not mean that it is on a par with Harin’s or Arjava’s or yours. It means that it is very good Shailen, but not that it is very good Harin or very good Arjava. “If ‘very good’ was won by them all,” you write! But, good heavens, you write that as if I were a master giving marks in a class. I may write “good” or “very good” on the work of a novice if I see that it has succeeded in being poetry and not mere verse however correct or well rhymed — but if Harin or if Arjava or you were to produce work like that, I would not say “very good” at all. There are poems of yours which I have slashed and pronounced unsatisfactory, but if certain others were to send me that, I would say, “Well, you have been remarkably successful this time.” I am not giving comparative marks according to a fixed scale. I am using words flexibly according to the occasion and the individual. It would be the same with different kinds of writing. If I write “very good” or “excellent” on some verses of Dara about his chair, I am not giving it a certificate of equality with some poem of yours similarly appreciated — I am only saying that as humorous easy verse in the lightest vein it is very successful, an entertaining piece of work. Applied to your poem it would mean something different altogether.

Coming from your huge P.S. to the tiny body of your letter, what do you mean by “a perfect success”? I meant that pitched in a certain key and style it [a certain poem] had worked itself out very well in that key and style in a very satisfying way from the point of view of thought, expression and rhythm. From that standpoint it is a perfect success. If you ask whether it is at your highest possible pitch of inspiration, I would say no, but it is nowhere weak or inadequate and it says something poetically well worth saying and says it well. One cannot always be writing at the highest pitch of one’s possibility, but that is no reason why work of very good quality in itself should be rejected.

15 November 1934