Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

CWSA 27

Fragment ID: 6646

Poetic Expression and Personal Feeling [3]

These designations, a magnified ego, an exalted outlook of the vital mind, apply in sadhana, but hardly to poetic expression which lifts or ought to lift to a field of pure personal-impersonal bhāva. An utterance of this kind can express a state of consciousness or an experience which is not necessarily the writer’s personal position or ego attitude but that of an inner spirit. So long as it is so the question of ego does not arise. It arises only if one turns away from the poem to the writer and asks in what mood he wrote it and that is a question of psychological fact alien to the purpose of poetry.

29 June 1935