Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1937

Letter ID: 1857

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

February 19, 1937

You are a most wonderful God, Sir! More queer than my poems, if you don’t mind my saying so. You have been hammering this surrealism into my soul for such a long time and now you say that I got it from Baron?

You don’t seem to have read carefully my letter to Dilip. I said your poems belong to the Dream-Consciousness, but I had used the word Surrealism lightly – i.e. your poems are not on a line with the actual surrealism of the day, the thing to which the name is given.

But this last poem is Baronic, (I don’t know what Baron’s poems are like, but I mean they have the modern incoherence).

If Baron has anything to do with it, it was only the other day that I first met him.

As this came soon after meeting Baron, I said as a joke that it must have been a real modern surrealistic influence from him.

Well, regarding yesterday’s poem, you seem to have understood the surrealist lines, not the others.

Good Lord! the only lines I understood were those I marked as not entirely surrealistic.

I thought the reverse.

So did I.

Now I find that in spite of your long letters, I have not really grasped what this blessed surrealism is.

I wrote very clearly in my letter to Dilip that I did not know myself what Surrealism is since I have not studied either surrealistic theory or surrealistic literature. I gathered from what I have read – reviews, citations – that it was dream-consciousness of a lower type (therefore incoherent and often ugly). I also explained at great length in another letter that there was a Dream-Consciousness of a higher type. Are these distinctions really so difficult to understand?