X says: “If you want to publish your literary work, you must see that people would understand it – not the public at large, but, as Virginia Woolf says, a select public. Otherwise don't publish at all.”
Nirodbaran
Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo
Second Series
2. Art and Literature
Literary Activity and Yoga
X says: “If you want to publish your literary work, you must see that people would understand it – not the public at large, but, as Virginia Woolf says, a select public. Otherwise don't publish at all.”
What is not understood or appreciated by one select circle may be understood or appreciated by another select circle or in the future like Blake's poetry. Nobody appreciated Blake in his own time. Now he ranks as a great poet, more poetic than Shakespeare, says Housman. Tagore wrote he could not appreciate X's poetry because it is too “yogic” for him. Is Tagore unselect, one of the public at large?
I don't agree at all with not publishing because you won't be understood. At that rate many great poets would have remained unpublished. What about the unintelligible Mallarmé who had such a great influence on later French poetry?
24.07.1936