Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

CWSA 27

Fragment ID: 6649

Literary Style and Hereditary Influences

It seems to me that this statement¹ is quite untrue. A man’s style expresses himself, not the sum and outcome of his ancestors.

24 January 1937

¹ “For style in the full sense is more than the deliberate and designed creation, more even than the unconscious and involuntary creation, of the individual man who therein expresses himself. The self that he thus expresses is a bundle of inherited tendencies that came the man himself can never entirely know whence.” – Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life (London: Constable, 1923), p. 175.

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