Sri Aurobindo

The Future Poetry

CWSA.- Volume 26

Note on the Texts

The Future Poetry was first published serially in the monthly review Arya between December 1917 and July 1920 in thirty-two instalments. The starting-point for these chapters was a book by James H. Cousins, New Ways in English Literature (Ganesh & Co., Madras, preface dated November 1917). A copy of this book was sent to Sri Aurobindo shortly after its publication for review in the Arya. He began a review (see Appendix I) but soon abandoned it in favour of a larger work drawn, as he wrote later, from his “own ideas and his already conceived view of art and life”.

Revision of The Future Poetry. The Future Poetry was not published as a book during Sri Aurobindo’s lifetime. He wished to revise the Arya chapters before republishing them and twice undertook this task, first in the late 1920s or early 1930s, and then in the last years of his life, apparently in 1950. During the first period he revised seventeen chapters: 2 – 14, 16, 25, 27 and 32. The work done ranges from very light retouching to the rewriting of entire chapters. During the second period he dictated to his amanuensis changes and additions to twenty chapters, thirteen of which had been revised during the earlier period. This later revision is mostly light — in some chapters only a word or two was added or changed — but it does include two considerable additions to Chapter 19 and an incomplete opening for a planned new first chapter (see Appendix III). Sri Aurobindo had plans for much more extensive additions. In particular he wished to write a chapter or chapters on contemporary poetry, and was considering a treatment of the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century.

All told twenty-four of the book’s thirty-two chapters received some revision at one time or another. A table outlining the nature and extent of the revision of each chapter appears in the reference volume (volume 35).

When asked in 1949 about the possibility of publishing The Future Poetry, Sri Aurobindo replied that it

cannot be published as it is, for there must be a considerable rearrangement of its matter since publication from month to month left its plan straggling and ill-arranged and also one or two chapters will have to be omitted or replaced by other new ones. I do not wish it to be published in its present imperfect form.

Editions of The Future Poetry. In 1953, three years after Sri Aurobindo’s passing, The Future Poetry was published as a book by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry. The publishers were at that time unaware of the existence of the bulk of Sri Aurobindo’s revision. The edition therefore was practically a reprint of the Arya chapters. The only parts of the revision used were the two long passages added to Chapter 19 in 1950. In 1971, the 1953 text was reproduced along with “Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art” as volume 9 of the de luxe edition of the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library. The next year the popular edition of this volume was issued, as well as a separate, photographically reduced edition. In 1985 a new edition of The Future Poetry, incorporating for the first time all the author’s revision, was published by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. This edition was reprinted in 1991 and 1994. It omitted the letters; in The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo these are included in volume 27, Letters on Poetry and Art.

The present edition differs very little from the edition of 1985. The text has been checked against Sri Aurobindo’s manuscripts, which consist of (1) pages torn from the Arya, many of which have his handwritten or dictated changes and additions, and (2) a few loose sheets containing longer additions. Only fragments remain of the manuscript used for printing the Arya.

Sri Aurobindo quoted almost a hundred lines or passages of English poetry as illustrations. The sources of these quotations are given in a table in the reference volume. He seems to have quoted from the works of older poets largely from memory; for contemporary writers he relied mostly on Cousins’ New Ways in English Literature. The editors have reproduced the quotations as they appear in the Arya except when a misprint obviously occurred.

On Quantitative Metre. Sri Aurobindo wrote this essay for inclusion in his Collected Poems and Plays, which was brought out in 1942 by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and printed at the Government Central Press, Hyderabad. A separate booklet was also printed at that time from the same setting of type. On Quantitative Metre included as examples fifteen poems written in quantitative metres. The fifteenth consisted of the first 371 lines of Ilion divided into five sections with headings. These poems are reproduced here with the notes on metre Sri Aurobindo provided for them. In Collected Poems, volume 2 of The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, they appear without notes. Ilion is printed there in its entirety.

In the present volume On Quantitative Metre is published along with The Future Poetry for the first time. The text of the essay has been carefully checked against Sri Aurobindo’s manuscripts and the text printed in 1942.