Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Comments on Some Examples of Western Poetry (up to 1900)

Swinburne [3]

Don’t you think the idea of the infliction of suffering must be kept apart from the point made by you in your first note that the infliction was for a perversely passionate pleasure — and also from the question whether in Swinburne’s poetry it is objected to by the recipient or not, since the lines are now taken by themselves?

Why should the lines be taken by themselves as if they were not a part of Swinburne’s poem? I cannot see any idealistic discipline or high ascetic transport in a sadistic desire however poetically expressed. An erotic perversity is neither ideal nor a discipline.

25 December 1934