Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 3. Literature, Art, Beauty and Yoga
Section 1. Appreciation of Poetry and the Arts
Appreciation of Poetry

Contemporary Judgment of Poetry [5]

Dilip says, “If you want to publish your literary work, you must see that people understand it — not the public at large but, as Virginia Woolf says, a select public.”

What is not understood or appreciated by one select circle may be understood or appreciated by another select circle or in the future like Blake’s poetry. Nobody appreciated Blake in his own time — now he ranks as a great poet,— more poetic than Shakespeare, says Housman. Tagore wrote he could not appreciate Dilip’s poetry because it is too “Yogic” for him. Is Tagore unselect, one of the public at large?

I don’t agree at all with not publishing because you won’t be understood. At that rate many great poets would have remained unpublished. What about the unintelligible Mallarmé who had such a great influence on later French poetry?

24 July 1936