Talks on Poetry
by Amal Kiran (K. D. Sethna)

The author, renamed Amal Kiran by Sri Aurobindo, is an inmate of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and is well known for his scholarly and innovative works on English literature, philosophy and Indian history.

The present book is a collection of his talks mostly delivered without any helpful accessories to the students of the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, where he was appointed lecturer in poetry soon after its founding. His classes were from the begining quite unusual as he used to teach according to his inspiration without following any set methods of teaching.

"The talks" the author has noted, "were meant to encourage an approach to poetry with a sensitive wide-ranging zest and a look at it as at a breathing and moving organism.... In all poetic creation there is the heart and there is the art. The latter reveals the self-discovering development of the former. To neglect either is to miss the true organicity of a poem. To study a poem rightly we must let a happy excitement of detailed scrutiny play at once over its core of significance and its outspread of suggestive sounds."