SOURCE: "Sri Aurobindo as Poet," in Sri Aurobindo: Indian Poet, Philosopher, and Mystic, David Marlowe, Ltd., 1949, pp. 113-33.

In the following excerpt, Langley traces the development of Aurobindo's poetry.

Sri Aurobindo defines poetry as "rhythmic speech which rises at once from the heart of the seer and from the distant home of truth". It is not by accident that the language is rhythmic, for rhythm gives individuality to the expression and enables the poet naturally to reproduce the creative unity and rhythm of life and spirit.

"The characteristic power of the poet", Aurobindo asserts, "is vision", and he contrasts this with the essentially different powers of the philosopher and scientist, the former of which he describes as "discriminative thought" and the latter as "analytic observation". "The greatest poets", he writes, "are those who have had a large and powerful interpretive and intuitive vision, and whose poetry has arisen...