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

Literary Style and Hereditary Influences

It seems to me that this {{0}}statement[[“For style in the full sense is more than the deliberate and designed creation, more even than the unconscious and involuntary creation, of the individual man who therein expresses himself. The self that he thus expresses is a bundle of inherited tendencies that came the man himself can never entirely know whence.” — Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life (London: Constable, 1923), p. 175.]] is quite untrue. A man’s style expresses himself, not the sum and outcome of his ancestors.

24 January 1937