Letters on Poetry and Art

 

 

CONTENTS

 

Pre-content

 

 

PART ONE
POETRY AND ITS CREATION

     
 

Section One. The Sources of Poetry

   

Poetic Creation

   

Sources of Inspiration

   

Overhead Poetry

   

Examples of Overhead Poetry

     
 

Section Two. The Poetry of the Spirit

   

Psychic, Mystic and Spiritual Poetry

   

Poet, Yogi, Rishi, Prophet, Genius

   

The Poet and the Poem

     
 

Section Three. Poetic Technique

   

Technique, Inspiration, Artistry

   

Rhythm

   

English Metres

   

Greek and Latin Classical Metres

   

Quantitative Metre in English and Bengali

   

Metrical Experiments in Bengali

   

Rhyme

   

English Poetic Forms

   

Substance, Style, Diction

   

Grades of Perfection in Poetic Style

   

Examples of Grades of Perfection in Poetic Style

     
 

Section Four. Translation

   

Translation: Theory

   

Translation: Practice

     
 

PART TWO
ON HIS OWN AND OTHERS’ POETRY

     
 

Section One. On His Poetry and Poetic Method

   

Inspiration, Effort, Development

   

Early Poetic Influences

   

On Early Translations and Poems

   

On Poems Published in Ahana and Other Poems

   

Metrical Experiments

   

On Some Poems Written during the 1930s

   

On Savitri

   

Comments on Some Remarks by a Critic

   

On the Publication of His Poetry

     
 

Section Two. On Poets and Poetry

   

Great Poets of the World

   

Remarks on Individual Poets

   

Comments on Some Examples of Western Poetry (up to 1900)

   

Twentieth-Century Poetry

   

Comments on Examples of Twentieth-Century Poetry

   

Indian Poetry in English

   

Poets of the Ashram

   

Comments on the Work of Poets of the Ashram

   

Philosophers, Intellectuals, Novelists and Musicians

   

Comments on Some Passages of Prose

     
 

Section Three. Practical Guidance for Aspiring Writers

   

Guidance in Writing Poetry

   

Guidance in Writing Prose

   

Remarks on English Pronunciation

   

Remarks on English Usage

   

Remarks on Bengali Usage

     
 

PART THREE
LITERATURE, ART, BEAUTY AND YOGA

     
 

Section One.  Appreciation of Poetry and the Arts

   

Appreciation of Poetry

   

Appreciation of the Arts in General

   

Comparison of the Arts

   

Appreciation of Music

     
 

Section Two. On the Visual Arts

   

General Remarks on the Visual Arts

   

Problems of the Painter

   

Painting in the Ashram

     
 

Section Three. Beauty and Its Appreciation

   

General Remarks on Beauty

   

Appreciation of Beauty

     
 

Section Four. Literature, Art, Music and the Practice of Yoga

   

Literature and Yoga

   

Painting, Music, Dance and Yoga

     
 

APPENDIXES

   

Appendix I. The Problem of the Hexameter

   

Appendix II. An Answer to a Criticism

   

Appendix III. Remarks on a Review

     
 

NOTE ON THE TEXTS

Quantitative Metre in English

and Bengali

 

English Quantitative Verse -Rhythm in English and Bengali

 

There have been attempts to write in English quantitative verse on the Greek and Latin principle with the classical metres, attempts which began in the Elizabethan times, but they have not been successful because the method was either too slipshod or tried to adhere too rigidly to the rules of quantity natural to Greek and Latin but not to the English tongue instead of making an adaptation of it for the English ear or, still better, discovering directly in English itself the true principle of an English quantitative metre. I believe it is perfectly possible to acclimatise the quantitative principle in English and with great advantage. I have not seen Bridges' attempts, but I do not see why his failure -if it was one -should damn the possibility. I think one day it will be done.

It is true that English rhythm falls most naturally into the iambic movement. But I do not admit the adverse strictures passed on the other bases of metre. All depends on how you handle them, -if as much pain is bestowed as on the iambic, the fault attributed to them will disappear. Even as it is, the trochaic metre in the hands of great poets like Milton, Shelley, Keats does not pall -I do not get tired of the melody of the Skylark. Swinburne's anapaestic rhythms, as in Dolores, are kept up for pages without difficulty with the most royal ease, without fatigue either to the writer or the reader. Both trochee and anapaest are surely quite natural to the language. The dactyl is more difficult to continue, but I believe it can be done, even in a long dactylic metre like the hexameter, if interspersed with spondees (as the metre allows) and supported by subtle modulations of rhythm, variations of pause and caesura. The iambic metre itself was at first taxed with monotony in a drumming beat until it was used

 

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in a more plastic way by Shakespeare and Milton. All depends on the skill which one brings to the work and the tool is quarrelled with only when the workman does not know how to use it.

The English language is not naturally melodious like the Italian or Bengali -no language with a Teutonic base can be -but it is capable of remarkable harmonic effects and also it can by a skilful handling be made to give out the most beautiful melodies. Bengali and Italian are soft, easy and mellifluous languages -English is difficult and has to be struggled with in order to produce its best effects, but out of that very difficulty has arisen an astonishing plasticity, depth and manifold subtlety of rhythm. These qualities do not repose on metrical building alone but much more on the less analysable elements of the entire rhythmic structure. The metrical basis itself is a peculiar and subtle combination on which English rhythm depends without explicitly avowing it, a skilful and most extraordinarily variable combination of three elements -the numeric foot dependent on the number of syllables, the use of the stress foot and a play of stresses, and a recognisable but free and plastic use of quantitative play (not quantitative feet), all three running into each other.

I am afraid your estimate here is marred by the personal or national habit. One is always inclined to make this claim for one's own language because one can catch every shade and element of it while in another language, however well-learned, the ear is not so clair-audient. I cannot agree that the examples you give of Bengali melody beat hollow the melody of the greatest English lyrists. Shakespeare, Swinburne's best work in Atalanta and elsewhere, Shelley at his finest and some others attain a melody that cannot be surpassed. It is a different kind of melody, but not inferior.

Bengali has a more melodious basis, it can accomplish melody more easily than English, it has a freer variety of melodies now, for formerly as English poetry was mostly iambic, Bengali poetry used to be mostly aksaravrtta. (I remember how my brother Manmohan would annoy me by denouncing the absence of melody, the featureless monotony of Bengali rhythm

 

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and tell me how Tagore ought to be read to be truly melodious -like English in stress, with ludicrous effects. That however is by the way.) What I mean is that variety of melodic bases was not conspicuous at that time in Bengali poetry. Nowadays this variety is there and undoubtedly opens possibilities such as perhaps do not exist in other languages.

I do not see, however, how the metrical aspect by itself can really be taken apart from other more subtle elements. I do not mean the spirit and feeling or the sense of the language only, though without depth or adequacy there metrical melody is only a melodious corpse, but the spirit and feeling or subtle (not intellectual) elements of rhythm and it is on these that English depends for the greater power and plasticity of its harmonic and even if to a less extent of its melodic effects. In a word there is truth in what you say but it cannot be pushed so far as you push it.

May 1934

 

Bengali and English Quantitative Poetry

 

Nishikanta's poem in laghu-guru is splendid. But perhaps Girija would say that it is a pure Bengali rhythm, which means I sup pose that it reads as well and easily in Bengali as if it were not written on an unusual rhythmic principle. I suppose that must necessarily be the aim of a new metre or metrical principle; it is what I am trying to do with quantitative efforts in English.

 

*

 

Is it true that the laghu-guru is to the Bengali ear as impossible as would be to the English ear the line made up by Tagore: "Autumn flaunteth in his bushy bowers"? In English such a violence could not be entertained for a moment. It was because Spenser and others tried to base their hexameters and pentameters on this flagrant violation of the first law of English rhythm that the first attempt to introduce quantitative metres in English proved a failure. Accent cannot be ignored in English rhythm -it is why in my attempts at quantitative metre I always count a strongly accentuated syllable, even if the vowel is short, as a long one ―

 

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for the stress does really make it long for metrical purposes.             

21 July 1936

 

English Prosody and Bengali Metrics

 

You have set me two very intricate subjects to wrestle with -English prosody and the yaugmika ­ aksara tangle! English . prosody is neither syllabic nor quantitative nor anything else; it is simply English prosody -that is to say, everything together, except what it pretends to be. As to the other, you and Prabodh Sen and Anilbaran and Tagore and the rest are already in such a tangle of controversy from which there seems no hope of your ever getting out that I don't propose to add any cord of my own to the knot, and probably, if I tried, it would be a very incorrect cord indeed. However I will try to explain myself as soon as possible. . . .             

4 June 1934

 

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