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 [3]

It is probably modern (contemporary) English poetry of which your friend is thinking. Here I am no expert; but I understand that the turn there is to suppress emotion, rhetoric, colouring, sentiment and arrive at something very direct, vivid, expressive, recording either the thing exactly as it is or some intimate essential truth of the thing without wrapping it up in ideas and sentiments, superfluous images and epithets. It does not look as if all contemporary English poetry were like that, it is only one strong trend; but such as it is, it has not as yet produced anything very decisive, great or successful. Much of it seems to be mere flat objectivity or, what is worse, an exaggerated emphatic objectivity; emotion seems often to be replaced by an intensified vital-physical sensation of the object. You will perhaps understand what I mean if you read the poem quoted on pages 316–17 of the Parichay (also made much of in a book on English modernistic poetry sent to me by Arjava) — “red pieces of day — hills made of blue and green paper — Satanic and blasé — black goat lookingly wanders”, images expressing vividly an impression made on the nerves through the sight by the described objects. Admittedly it is — at least when pushed to such a degree,— a new way of looking at things in poetry, but not essentially superior to the impressions created on the heart or the mental imagination by the object. All the same there is behind, but still not successfully achieved, something real, an attempt to get away from ornate mental constructions about things to the expression of the intimate truth of the things themselves as directly seen by a deeper sight within us. Only it seems to me a mistake to theorise that only by this kind of technique and in this particular way the thing can be done. I have to form my idea more fully when I have finished Arjava’s book, but this is what impresses me at present.

1 October 1932