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 [5]

Please give me a few names of poets — especially modern poets, whom I should study.

I have very little familiarity with the names of modern poets subsequent to A.E. and Yeats and De la Mare, all of whom you know. There are about a hundred of them moderns, Spender + x + y + z + p2 etc. Before that there were Hopkins and Flecker and others and before that Meredith and Hardy and Francis Thompson. You can tackle any of them you can lay your hands on in the library. Watson and Brooke and other Edwardians and Georgians would not be good for you.

16 October 1938