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

The Poetry of the 1930s and 1940s [2]

The things you will see him [a critic in the New Statesman and Nation] assuming ... may be more widely prevalent, to the exclusion of more catholic tastes and liberal views, than I have hitherto believed. In which case there perhaps could be no sort of public in England for poetry which is mystical or spiritual.

I imagine it is only one dominant tendency of the day that is represented by these autocrats; the other is precisely the “mystic” tendency — and I don’t think it will be so easily snuffed out as that.

23 June 1932