Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

CWSA 27

Fragment ID: 6975

Keats and Shelley [1]

As regards Keats and Shelley why attach so much importance to fluency? Keats besides produced enough in his few years of productivity and enough besides of a high excellence to rank him among the greater English poets. What might he not have done if he had lived to fifty? But I don’t believe he had any dramatic genius in him. None of these poets had. Shelley’s Cenci is a remarkable feat of dramatic construction and poetic imagination, but it has no organic life like the work of the Elizabethans or the Greeks or like such dramas as the Cid or Racine’s tragedies.

7 February 1935