Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Twentieth-Century Poetry

Early Twentieth-Century English Poetry

About modern English poetry of the early part of this century Livingston Lowes, writing in 1918, remarks in his Convention and Revolt in Poetry: “That which does allure it in the East is an amazing tininess and finesse — the delicacy, that is to say, and the deftness, and the crystalline quality of the verse of China and Japan....

The strange, the remote, in its larger, more broadly human aspects ... — all this has been gradually losing its hold upon poetry. Instead, when we fly from the obsession of the familiar, it is growingly apt to be to the more recondite, or precious, or quintessential, or even perverse embodiments of the strange or far — to ‘the special, exquisite perfume’ of Oriental art, ... to the exceptional and the esoteric, in a word, rather than to the perennial and universal.”

The remark of Livingston Lowes is no doubt correct. Even now and even where it is the external, everyday, obvious that is being taken as theme, we see often enough that what the mind is trying to find is some recondite, precious or quintessential aspect of the everyday and obvious — something in it exceptional or esoteric. But while in the East, the way to do it is known, the West does not seem yet to have found it. Instead of going inside, getting intimate with what is behind, and writing of the outside also from that inside experience, they are still trying to stare through the surface into the inner depths with some X-ray of mental imagination or “intuition” and the result is not the quintessence itself, but a shadow-picture of the quintessence. That is perhaps why there is so much feeling of effort, artifice, “even perverse embodiment” in much of this poetry — and no very definitive success as yet. But, I suppose, the way itself, the endeavour to leave the obvious surfaces and get deeper is the only road left for poetry, otherwise it can but repeat itself in the old modes with slight alterations till exhaustion brings decadence. On the road that is being now followed there is also evident danger of decadence, through an excess of mere technique and artifice or through a straining towards the merely out-of-the-way or the perverse. But there seems to be no other door of progress than to make the endeavour.

10 October 1932