Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 1. On His Poetry and Poetic Method
On Savitri

On the Verse and Structure of the Poem [1]

Please send me some passages from Savitri together with my selections from the blank-verse poetry of Abercrombie that I sent you in order to help me distinguish at a glance “Hyperion from a satyr”.

Savitri is built on another plan altogether. It is blank verse without enjambements (except rarely) — each line a thing by itself and arranged in paragraphs of one, two, three, four, five lines (rarely a longer series), in an attempt to catch something of the Upanishadic and Kalidasian movements, so far as that is a possibility in English. You can’t take that as a model — it is too difficult a rhythm-sculpture to be a model. I shall myself know whether it is a success or not, only when I have finished 2 or 3 books. But where is the time now for such a work? When the supramental has finished coming down — then perhaps.

25 December 1932