Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
SABCL 26
Fragment ID: 7915
In regard to Tagore, I understand from X that his objections to The Life Heavens were personal rather than in principle – that is, he himself had no such experience and could not take them as true (for himself), so they excited in him no emotion, while my poem Shiva1 was just the contrary. I don’t say anything to that, as I could not say anything if somebody condemned a poem of mine root-and-branch because he did not like it or on good grounds such as Cousins’ objection to the inferiority of the greater part of my poem In the Moonlight2 to the opening stanzas. I learnt a great deal from that objection: it pointed me the way I had to go towards “The Future Poetry”. Not that I did not know before, but that it gave precision and point to my previous perception. But still I don’t quite understand Tagore’s objection. I myself do not take many things as true in poetry (e.g. Dante’s Hell etc.) of which I yet feel the emotion. It is surely part of the power of poetry to open new worlds to us as well as to give a supreme voice to our own ideas, experiences and feelings. The Life Heavens may not do that for its readers, but, if so, it is a fault of execution, not of principle.
1 Collected Poems (Centenary Edition, 1972), p. 140.
2 Collected Poems (Centenary Edition, 1972), p. 55.