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

The Poetry of the 1930s and 1940s [6]

Originality is all right, but if you become so original that nobody can follow you and all fall behind gasping for breath, that is an excess of virtue. The modernist poets do that with the result that nobody has the least idea what they mean, not even themselves, and the farther result that, as it has been said “there are more people now who write poetry than read it”.

8 June 1938