Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 1. On His Poetry and Poetic Method
On Savitri

On the Composition of the Poem. Letters of 1945 – 1948 [2]

Your inference that ten books have been completed is unfortunately not correct. What has been completed, in a general way, with a sufficient finality of the whole form but subject to final changes in detail, is the first three books of the second part, The Book of Birth and Quest, The Book of Love, The Book of Fate; also in the same way, two books of the third part, The Book of Eternal Light and The Book of the Double Twilight. But a drastic recasting of the last two books still remains to be done and only a part of the eleventh has been subjected to that process. Worse still, the original Book of Death has not only to be recast but has to be split into two, The Book of Yoga and The Book of Death, and the first of these exists only in its first canto and a confused multi-versioned draft of the second, while all the rest, and that means many long cantos, has still to be written quite new, no draft of them yet exists.

22 April 1947