Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

CWSA 27

Fragment ID: 6732

Erotic Poetry

An expression of the lower vital lashed to imaginative fury is likely to produce not poetry but simply “sound and fury”,– “tearing a passion to tatters” – and in its full furiousness may even rise to rant and fustian. Erotic poetry more than any other needs the restraint of beauty and form and measure, otherwise it risks being no longer poetic but merely pathologic.

14 June 1932