Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

SABCL 26

Fragment ID: 7906

Q: In that long letter on your own poetry, apropos of my friend’s criticisms, you have written of certain influences of the later Victorian period on you. Meredith’s from “Modern Love” I have been unable to trace concretely – unless I consider some of the more pointed and bitter-sweetly reflective turns in “Songs to Myrtilla” to be Meredithian. That of Tennyson is noticeable in only a delicate picturesqueness here and there or else in the use of some words. Perhaps more than in your early blank verse the Tennysonian influence of this kind in general is there in “Songs to Myrtilla”. Arnold has influenced your blank verse in respect of particular constructions like two or three [?]buts as in

No despicable wayfarer, but Ruru,

But son of a great Rishi,

or

But tranquil, but august, but making easy...

Arnold is also observable in the way you build up and elaborate your similes both in “Urvasie” and in “Love and Death”. Less openly, a general tone of poetic mind from him can also be felt: it persists subtly in even the poems collected in “Ahana”, not to mention “Baji Prabhou”. I don’t know whether Swinburne is anywhere patent in your narratives: he probably does have something to do with “Songs to Myrtilld”. Stephen Phillips is the most direct influence in “Urvasie” and “Love and Death”. But as I have said in my essay on your blank verse he is assimilated into a stronger and more versatile genius, together with influences from the Elizabethans, Milton and perhaps less consciously Keats. In any case, whatever the influences, your early narratives are intensely original in essential spirit and movement and expressive body. It is only unreceptiveness or inattention that can fail to see this and to savour the excellence of your work.

A: The influences I spoke of were of course only such influences as every poet undergoes before he has entirely found himself. What you say about Arnold’s influence is quite correct; it acted mainly, however, as a power making for restraint and refinement, subduing any uncontrolled romanticism and insisting on clear lucidity and right form and building. Meredith had no influence on Songs to Myrtilla; even afterwards I did not make myself acquainted with all his poetry, it was only Modern Love and poems like the sonnet on Lucifer and the Ascent to Earth of the Daughter of Hades that I strongly admired and it had its effect on the formation of my poetic style and its after-effects in that respect are not absent from Savitri. It is only Swinburne’s early lyrical poems that exercised any power on me, Dolores, Hertha, The Garden of Proserpine and others that rank among his best work,– also Atalanta in Calydon, his later lyrical poetry I found too empty and his dramatic and narrative verse did not satisfy me. One critic characterised Love and Death as an extraordinarily brilliant and exact reproduction of Keats: what do you say to that? I think Stephen Phillips had more to do with it.

7-7-1947