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

Housman, Watson, Hardy, Bridges

I hear from Nolini that you want two books (reviewed in the New Statesman) representing the achievement of the seventeenth-century “Metaphysicals”, in order to add something about them to your Future Poetry.... There is another gap also, perhaps as serious: there is nothing about Coventry Patmore, Francis Thompson and Alice Meynell. And one other name — not belonging to either group but verging on the mystical domain — is worth inclusion: Christina Rossetti. Perhaps something on Gerard Manly Hopkins wouldn’t be uninteresting, too. Among non-mystical poets there are some omissions also: Chapman, for instance — and in the recent group, William Watson, Thomas Hardy, A.E. Housman and Robert Bridges.

I did not deal with all these poets because it was not in the scope of my idea to review the whole literature, but to follow only the main lines. But the main difficulty was that at the time I had no books and could only write from memory. I have read nothing of Housman — what I had read of Watson or Hardy did not attract me and these are anyhow not central figures nor near the centre. Bridges was also a side figure at the time I wrote, it is only after his Laureateship that he came much forward. I had read only his Eros and Psyche and a few other things, and he did not give me the impression of being on one of the main lines. But I feel now that before the book can be published it has to be brought more up to date and the place of the poets who attempted spiritual poetry more fully indicated.

23 January 1934