Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Twentieth-Century Poetry

Chesterton [2]

I am sending you the first pages of an essay on Chesterton. I hope you will wait till you have finished the whole before declaring that the case is not proven.

You have made good to a certain extent — but are these strikingnesses all that there is in Chesterton? Something more is needed to make a poet of rank.

I do not think the comparison with Coleridge can hold if it is intended to indicate anything like equality. Coleridge’s poetry tells by its union of delicate and magical beauty with exquisite simplicity and straightness. Chesterton never loses the rhetorician. Even in these passages there is something of the rhetorician’s brazen clang, an excited violence, a forced note however striking. It rises into sheer poetry, so far as I can see, only in three of the passages quoted, the Wessex dog {{0}}simile,[[And Wessex lay in a patch of peace,(((1)))Like a dog in a patch of sun —]] that of the illumined {{0}}manuscripts[[It was wrought in the monk’s slow manner,(((1)))From silver and sanguine shell,(((1)))Where the scenes are little and terrible(((1)))Keyholes of heaven and hell.]] and finally the description of the Dark Ages and the fall of {{0}}Rome.[[When Caesar’s sun fell out of the sky(((1)))And whoso hearkened right(((1)))Could only hear the plunging(((1)))Of the nations in the night.]] The last in spite of haunting ghosts of Kipling and Macaulay pursuing it is fine in vision and expression and substance. Chesterton however exceeds his ghosts — he has something of the racer in him and not merely of the prancing cart-horses they were.