The Letter
dated 4 May 1947 from Sri Aurobindo was supposed to be, as I suggested, “between
ourselves”; there is too much that is private and personal in it for publicity.
It is something that can be shown to those who can appreciate and understand,
but to an ordinary reader I might seem to be standing on my defence rather than
attacking and demolishing a criticism which might damage the appreciation of it
in readers who are not sure of their own critical standard and reliability of
their taste and so might be shaken by well-phrased judgements and plausible
reasonings such as Mendonça’s: they might make the same confusion as Mendonça
himself between an apology and an apologia. An idea might rise that I am not
sure of the values of my own poetry especially the earlier poetry and accept
his valuation of it. The humility you speak of is very largely Socratic humility,
the element of irony in it is considerable; but readers not accustomed to
fineness of shades might take it literally and conclude wrongly that I accepted
the strictures passed by an unfavourable criticism. A poet who puts no value or
very low value on his own writing has no business to write poetry or to publish
it or keep it in publication; if I allowed the publication of the Collected Poems [1] it is because I
judged them worth publishing. Your friend’s objection has therefore some value.
On the other hand in defending I may seem to be eulogizing my own work, which
is not a thing that can be done in public even if a poet’s estimate of his
achievement is self-assured as that of Horace, exegi monumentum aere perrenius, or as magnificent as Victor
Hugo’s. similarly the reply was not meant for Mendonça himself and I do not
think the whole can be shown to him without omissions or some editing; but if you
wish and if you think that he will not resent any strictures I have made, you
can show to him the passages relevant to his criticisms.
7 July 1947
[1] First published in 1942
In a long Letter
dated 4 May 1947 from Sri Aurobindo we have his comments on certain
criticisms made against his poetry by a friend of Amal Kiran (KD Sethna)
apropos of his book The Poetic Genius of
Sri Aurobindo (1947). Amal Kiran had asked Sri Aurobindo’s permission to
show this letter to his friend, but in a second letter dated 7 July 1947, the
present letter, Sri Aurobindo had explained the reasons why he did not favour
the idea of making it public. Since, however, any possibility of the first long
letter, of 4 May 1947, being misconstrued is removed if it is read along with
the second explanatory letter, it was included in the Birth Centenary
publication. It surely contains extremely valuable data relating to Sri
Aurobindo’s own literary development. Amal Kiran’s friend, Frederick Mendonça,
was a professor of English in St Xavier College,
Reference:
http://www.savitrithelightofthesupreme.org/blog/_archives/2009/1/19/4061986.html