Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
SABCL 26
Fragment ID: 7909
There was no trial or experiment – as I wrote, I did not proceed like that,– I put down what came, changing afterwards; but there too only as it came. At that time I had no theories, no methods or process. Bat Love and Death was not my first blank verse poem – I had written one before in the first years of my stay in Baroda which was privately published, but afterwards I got disgusted with it and rejected it.1 I made also some translations from the Sanskrit (in blank verse and heroic verse); but I don’t remember to what you are referring as the translation of Kalidasa. Most of all that has disappeared into the unknown in the whirlpools and turmoil of my political career.
4-7-1933
1 The poem in question is Urvasie, a long narrative which some critics are inclined to consider the best of Sri Aurobindo’s early blank verses. The reaction in himself against it which Sri Aurobindo speaks of in this letter persisted for many years during which he had no opportunity to see the poem again. On 5-2-1931 he wrote to a sadhak-poet: “I don’t think I have the Urvasie, neither am I very anxious to have the poem saved from oblivion.” Later when he saw it he found it not at all a thing to be thrown away and allowed its inclusion in Collected Poems and Plays (First Edition, 1942). Subsequently it has been included in Collected Poems (Centenary Edition, 1972), pp. 189-228.