Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 1. Poetry and its Creation
Section 3. Poetic Technique
Substance, Style, Diction

Erotic Poetry

An expression of the lower vital lashed to imaginative fury is likely to produce not poetry but simply “sound and fury”,— “tearing a passion to tatters” — and in its full furiousness may even rise to rant and fustian. Erotic poetry more than any other needs the restraint of beauty and form and measure, otherwise it risks being no longer poetic but merely pathologic.

14 June 1932