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

Surrealism [4]

Now I find that in spite of your long letters, I haven’t yet grasped what this blessed surrealism is.

I wrote very clearly in my letter to Dilip [published on pages 424 – 26] that I did not know myself what Surrealism is since I have not studied either surrealistic theory or surrealistic literature. I gathered from what I have read — reviews, citations — that it was dream-consciousness of a lower type (therefore incoherent and often ugly). I also explained at great length in another letter that there was a Dream Consciousness of a higher type. Are these distinctions really so difficult to understand?

19 February 1937