Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

CWSA 27

Fragment ID: 7522

Incomplete Reply

A criticism of my book On Quantitative Metre in the Calcutta New Review (Pitfalls on Parnassus by F. J. Friend-Pereira) attacks, not the principles of quantitative verse put forward by me,– these it holds excellent in theory, but the practice and even the possibility of putting them in practice. Unfortunately even the approval of the theory loses its value, as it seems to be based on a misconception. For the writer starts by thus describing the three constituent elements of quantitative verse,– accent, stress and quantity. “Accent is voice-weightage on a syllable; stress is voice-weightage on a one-syllable word (which may or may not be accented in itself) considered hic et nunc as a component part of a phrase, clause or sentence; quantity is this voice-weightage in poetry.” The reviewer evidently accepts the theory of voice-weightage as determining quantitative sound-value and accepts these three different weights, accent weight, stress weight, quantity weight. But the exact sense of the description of quantity is not clear to me and that of stress I find bewildering. In my own theory I have admitted two kinds of quantity, stress weight, weight of natural syllable quantity depending on vowel length or consonant weight, while accentual weight is disregarded as I accept it is a metrical length producer only when it coincides with stress and there its action is superfluous, since stress by itself is sufficient for the purpose. Other accentual pitches I disregard for metrical purposes and leave them only a rhythmic importance. Practically, then, in quantitative verse accent disappears as a quantity-determiner and takes a back place in the rhythm; just as does natural syllabic quantity in accentual verse.