Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Himself and the Ashram

The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35

His Life and Attempts to Write about It
On Himself as a Writer

Yoga and Literary Expression [2]

When one hears that you had to plod through a lot, one wonders whether the story of Valmiki’s sudden opening of poetic faculties is true — whether such a miracle is really possible.

Plod about what? For some things I had to plod — other things came in a moment or in two or three days like Nirvana or the power to appreciate painting. The “latent” philosopher failed to come out at the first shot (when I was in Calcutta) — after some years of incubation (?) it burst out like a volcano as soon as I started writing the Arya. There is no damned single rule for these things. Valmiki’s poetic faculty might open suddenly like a champagne bottle, but it does not follow that everybody’s will do like that.

1 April 1935