Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

SABCL 26

Fragment ID: 7538

In much of Aurobindo’s early English verse written between his eighteenth and twentieth years in England, included in “Songs to Myrtilla”, the derivative element is prominent. Not only are names and lineaments and allusions foreign in their garb, but the literary echoes are many and drawn from varied sources.

Foreign to what? He knew nothing about India or her culture, etc. What these poems express is the education and imaginations and ideas and feelings created by a purely European culture and surroundings – it could not be otherwise. In the same way the poems on Indian subjects and surroundings in the same book express the first reactions to India and Indian culture after the return home and a first acquaintance with these things.