Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 1. Poetry and its Creation
Section 2. The Poetry of the Spirit
The Poet and the Poem

Poetic Expression and Personal Feeling [3]

These designations, a magnified ego, an exalted outlook of the vital mind, apply in sadhana, but hardly to poetic expression which lifts or ought to lift to a field of pure personal-impersonal bhāva. An utterance of this kind can express a state of consciousness or an experience which is not necessarily the writer’s personal position or ego attitude but that of an inner spirit. So long as it is so the question of ego does not arise. It arises only if one turns away from the poem to the writer and asks in what mood he wrote it and that is a question of psychological fact alien to the purpose of poetry.

29 June 1935