Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

SABCL 26

Fragment ID: 7908

Q: As “Love and Death” I have long since adopted as my poetic Bible owing to the consummate beauty of its inspiration and art, and as now I am just awaking to a capacity in myself for blank verse, I shall be really happy if you will tell me the way in which you created this poem – the first falling of the seed of the idea, the growth and maturing of it, the influences assimilated from other poets, the mood and atmosphere you used to find most congenial and productive, the experience and the frequency of the afflatus, the pace at which you composed, the evolution of that multifarious, many-echoed yet perfectly original style and of a blank verse whose art is the most unfailing and, except for one too close repetition of the mannerism of the double “but”, the most unobtrusively conscious that I have seen. In my essay, in “Sri Aurobindo – the Poet”, I tried to show the white harmony, so to speak, of “Love and Death” in a kind of spectrum analysis, how colours from Latin, Italian, Sanskrit and English verse had fused here together with an absolutely original ultra-violet and infra-red not to be traced ^anywhere. Among English influences the most outstanding are, to my mind, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats and Stephen Phillips. In my essay I dwelt at length on the first two and on the magic way in which the passage about Rum’s sail along the Ganges and subsequent sea-plunge into Patala combines at the same time the early and later Milton and, with that, something of Shelley and Coleridge. Keats and Stephen Phillips I did not specially deal with. Keats seems to have added to the element of supple strength in your poem, while Phillips has tinged it with a certain poignant vividness and colourful delicacy. More fundamental, however, than the effect of his manner was, I think, the spell cast by certain moods, as it were, of his “Marpessa”.... But all this is guess-work – correct maybe in some respects, but I should like very much to have your own illuminating account of the matter, as well as your answer to the other points in my question at the beginning of this letter.

A: I cannot tell you much about it from that point of view; I did not draw consciously from any of the poets you mention except from Phillips. I read Marpessa and Christ in Hades before they were published and as I was just in the stage of formation then – at the age of 17 – they made a powerful impression which lasted until it was worked out in Love and Death. I dare say some influence of most of the great English poets and of others also, not English, can be traced in my poetry – I can myself see that of Milton, sometimes of Wordsworth and Arnold; but it was of the automatic kind – they came in unnoticed. I am not aware of much influence of Shelley and Coleridge, but since I read Shelley a great deal and took an intense pleasure in some of Coleridge’s poetry, they may have been there without my knowledge. The one work of Keats that influenced me was Hyperion – I dare say my blank verse got something of his stamp through that. The poem itself was written in a white heat of inspiration during 14 days of continuous writing – in the mornings, of course, for I had to attend office the rest of the day and saw friends in the evening. I never wrote anything with such ease and rapidity before or after. Your other questions I can’t very well answer – I have lived ten lives since then and don’t remember. I don’t think there was any falling of the seed of the idea or growth and maturing of it; it just came,– from my reading about the story of Ruru in the Mahabharata; I thought, “Well, here’s a subject”, and the rest burst out of itself. Mood and atmosphere? I never depended on these things that I know of – something wrote in me or didn’t write, more often didn’t, and that is all I know about it. Evolution of style and verse? Well, it evolved, I suppose – I assure you I didn’t build it. I was not much of a critic in those days – the critic grew in me by Yoga like the philosopher, and as for self-criticism the only standard I had was whether I felt satisfied with what I wrote or not, and generally I felt it was very fine when I wrote it and found it was very bad after it had been written, but I could not at that time have given you a reason either for the self-eulogy or the self-condemnation. Nowadays it is different, of course; for I am conscious of what I do and how things are done. I am afraid this will not enlighten you much but it is all I can tell you.

3-7-1933