Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 1. On His Poetry and Poetic Method
Early Poetic Influences

General Influences on His Early Poetry

In that long letter on your own poetry, apropos of my friend’s criticisms [see pp. 332–57], you have written of certain influences of the later Victorian period on you. Meredith’s from Modern Love I have been unable to trace concretely — unless I consider some of the more pointed and bitter-sweetly reflective turns in Songs to Myrtilla to be Meredithian. That of Tennyson is noticeable in only a delicate picturesqueness here and there or else in the use of some words. Perhaps more than in your early blank verse the Tennysonian influence of this kind in general is there in Songs to Myrtilla. Arnold has influenced your blank verse in respect of particular constructions like two or three “buts” as in

No despicable wayfarer, but Ruru,

But son of a great Rishi,

or

But tranquil, but august, but making easy ...

Arnold is also observable in the way you build up and elaborate your similes both in Urvasie and in Love and Death. Less openly, a general tone of poetic mind from him can also be felt: it persists subtly in even the poems collected in Ahana, not to mention Baji Prabhou. I don’t know whether Swinburne is anywhere patent in your narratives: he probably does have something to do with Songs to Myrtilla. Stephen Phillips is the most direct influence in Urvasie and Love and Death. But as I have said in my essay on your blank verse he is assimilated into a stronger and more versatile genius, together with influences from the Elizabethans, Milton and perhaps less consciously Keats. In any case, whatever the influences, your early narratives are intensely original in essential spirit and movement and expressive body. It is only unreceptiveness or inattention that can fail to see this and to savour the excellence of your work.

The influences I spoke of were of course influences only such as every poet undergoes before he has entirely found himself. What you say about Arnold’s influence is quite correct; it acted mainly however as a power making for restraint and refinement, subduing any uncontrolled romanticism and insisting on clear lucidity and right form and building. Meredith had no influence on Songs to Myrtilla; even afterwards I did not make myself acquainted with all his poetry, it was only Modern Love and poems like the sonnet on Lucifer and on the ascent to earth of the daughter of Hades [The Day of the Daughter of Hades] that I strongly admired and it had its effect in the formation of my poetic style and its after-effects in that respect are not absent from Savitri. It is only Swinburne’s early lyrical poems that exercised any power upon me, Dolores, Hertha, The Garden of Proserpine and others that rank among his best work,— also Atalanta in Calydon; his later lyrical poetry I found too empty and his dramatic and narrative verse did not satisfy me. One critic characterised Love and Death as an extraordinarily brilliant and exact reproduction of Keats: what do you say to that? I think Stephen Phillips had more to do with it.

7 July 1947