Sri Aurobindo's Poetic Career

Sri Aurobindo’s poetic output is enormous. The span of his creative activity covers a period of over sixty years, and his poetic output runs to over three thousand pages. He tried his hands at a number of poetic forms, and almost always with great success. He has to his credit lyrics, sonnets, narrative poems, epics, poetic plays, besides numerous translations and adaptations. For the convenience of study, his poetic career can be divided into three stages: The early stage, the middle stage and the last stage. This division is only to study his poetic career in a more lucid manner, for many of his poems composed in the earliest stage were printed at a much later date, and the trends and features of a later stage can also be noticed even in

This phase of poetic activity was of prodigious literary productivity and most of his themes and the symbolism of his later poetry were first worked out during this period in works such as Love and Death, Urvasie, Uloupie, The tale of Nala, the Rishi, Ahana etc. Inspired by the British poets of the Romantic school, the matter is typically Indian and spiritual.
As a poet, Sri Aurobindo is full of mystical approach. The poet has included the element of mysticism about the time and the place. The mysterious element ‘the Presence’ - ‘Thou’, has been left to be solved by the reader. In brief, this poem is the mystical narration of a mystical experience of the poet which encourages the reader to unravel the mystery of the further unfolding of the events on which the poet has intentionally chosen to remain mystically silent. Poems published in 1905 have a different tone. The problem of belief, and soliloquies and debates could be witnessed. The mood and manner of these writings explain why in certain minds Sri Aurobindo is equated with “The Philosopher as Poet”. An unequal volume, there are however, exceptions to the philosophizing mood. For instance, in a poem like Who, the poet speaks about the