Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1936

Letter ID: 1791

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

December 4, 1936

All that whipping for my good? “With the most philanthropic motive”? Gracious! The only good was to stop me from asking questions about J’s poem. But really what’s the motive? You want the mind to be completely silent?

At least decently silent – not always asking for an intellectual definition of everything mystic.

I have brought Housman and shall read him. I would like to get this point cleared if it can be cleared. Your Future Poetry may also give some idea if I can pick out the right chapter.

Don’t know that there is one (right chapter).

I don’t get sufficient time at night, so I have been writing in the afternoon also.

That’s all right.

If that is your “fag-end” really, then can’t Mother give me some Force?

Very inappropriate time for her also. Besides, it is I who am directly running the Poetry Department. However I am now more sprightly from 2.30 to 4.30. After that, correspondence – no chance for poetry.

If you object to my intellectual dissection, please mark the striking lines as you did yesterday in my Bengali poem, because at times I can see their beauty only after you’ve marked them – as it happened yesterday.

Strange! for they are full of poetic power and feeling and what Matthew Arnold would call “in the grand style”.