400 The Future Poetry
When asked in 1949 about the possibility of publishingThe Future
Poetry, Sri Aurobindo replied that it
cannot be published as it is, for there must be a considerable
rearrangement of its matter since publication from month to
month left its plan straggling and ill-arranged and also one or
two chapters will have to be omitted or replaced by other new
ones. I do not wish it to be published in its present imperfect
form.Editions ofThe Future Poetry. In 1953, three years after Sri Auro-
bindo’s passing,The Future Poetrywas published as a book by the Sri
Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry. The publishers were at that time un-
aware of the existence of the bulk of Sri Aurobindo’s revision. The edi-
tion therefore was practically a reprint of theAryachapters. The only
parts of the revision used were the two long passages added to Chapter
19 in 1950. In 1971, the 1953 text was reproduced along with “Letters
on Poetry, Literature and Art” as volume 9 of the de luxe edition of the
Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library. The next year the popular edi-
tion of this volume was issued, as well as a separate, photographically
reduced edition. In 1985 a new edition ofThe Future Poetry, incorpo-
rating for the first time all the author’s revision, was published by the
Sri Aurobindo Ashram. This edition was reprinted in 1991 and 1994.
It omitted the letters; in THECOMPLETEWORKS OFSRIAUROBINDO
these are included in volume 27,Letters on Poetry and Art.
The present edition differs very little from the edition of 1985.
The text has been checked against Sri Aurobindo’s manuscripts, which
consist of (1) pages torn from theArya, many of which have his hand-
written or dictated changes and additions, and (2) a few loose sheets
containing longer additions. Only fragments remain of the manuscript
used for printing theArya.
Sri Aurobindo quoted almost a hundred lines or passages of En-
glish poetry as illustrations. The sources of these quotations are given
in a table in the reference volume. He seems to have quoted from the
works of older poets largely from memory; for contemporary writers
he relied mostly on Cousins’New Ways in English Literature.The
editors have reproduced the quotations as they appear in theArya
except when a misprint obviously occurred.