Question: What is the difference between your songs and your poetry?

Sri Chinmoy: If somebody is wearing a white cotton sari, people will appreciate its beauty and simplicity. This is like my poetry. Then again, if the same person wears a silk sari, it looks so beautiful. This is like my songs. Natural beauty I want from my songs and also from my poems, but my songs have more luminosity.

Poetry, in my case, is like a spontaneous fountain, whereas my music, you can say, is like a flowing, murmuring river. Only a few hundred of my Bengali songs originated as poems. Most of my 8,000 Bengali songs were songs right from the beginning. But my English songs almost always began as poems.