Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Twentieth-Century Poetry

Georgian Poetry

The stanzas are not quite successful. [Certain lines] have too much a stamp of what I think was called Georgian poetry — though I suppose it would more properly be called late-Victorian-Edwardian-early-Georgian. The defect of that poetry is that it has a fullness of language which fails to go home — things that ought to be very fine, but miss being so; so much of the poetry of Rupert Brooke as I have seen, for instance, always gives me that impression. In our own language I might say that it is an inspiration which tries to come from the higher mind but only succeeds in inflating the voice of the poetic intelligence.

1 November 1936