Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1934 — 1935

Letter ID: 506

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

October 24, 1934

I think you need not be anxious about the approaching supramental Silence. That silence is likely to sing more powerfully than the voicefulness that preceded it. But your proposal has given me such a shock (moral or immoral, not physical) in the solar plexus that it almost reduces me to an astonished though still non-supramental silence.

I am afraid you are under an illusion as to the success of “Love and Death” in England. “Love and Death” dates – it belongs to the time when Meredith and Phillips were still writing and Yeats and A.E. were only in bud if not in ovo. Since then the wind has changed and even Yeats and A.E. are already a little high and dry on the sands of the past, while the form or other characteristics of “Love and Death” are just the things that are anathema to the post-war writers and literary critics. I fear it would be, if not altogether ignored which is most likely, regarded as a feeble and belated Indian imitation of an exploded literary model dead and buried long ago. I don’t regard it in that light myself, but it is not my opinion that counts for success but that of the modern highbrows. If it had been published when it was written it might have been a success, but now! Of course, I know there are many people still in England, if it got into their hands, who would read it with enthusiasm, but I don’t think it would get into their hands at all. As for the other poems they could not go with “Love and Death.” When the time comes for publication, the sonnets will have to be published in a separate book of sonnets and the others in another, separate book of (mainly) lyrical poems – so it cannot be now. That at least is my present idea. It is not that I am against publication for all time, but my idea was to wait for the proper time rather than do anything premature.

One thing however could be done. Prithwi Singh could send his friend “Love and Death” and perhaps the “Six Poems” and sound the publishers as to whether the publication, in their eye, would be worthwhile from their point of view. That could at least give a clue.