Sri Aurobindo - Karuna Yoga

Note on the Text
SAVITRI began as a narrative poem of moderate length based
on a legend told in the Mahabharata. Sri Aurobindo considered
the story to be originally “one of the many symbolic myths
of the Vedic cycle”. Bringing out its symbolism and charging
it progressively with his own spiritual vision, he turned Savitri
into the epic it is today.
By the time it was published, some passages had gone
through dozens of drafts. Sri Aurobindo explained how he
wrote the poem: “I used Savitri as a means of ascension. I began
with it on a certain mental level, each time I could reach a higher
level I rewrote from that level. . . . In fact Savitri has not been
regarded by me as a poem to be written and finished, but as a
field of experimentation to see how far poetry could be written
from one’s own yogic consciousness and how that could be
made creative.”
The following outline of the composition and publication
of Savitri draws upon all existing manuscripts and other textual
materials, supplemented by the author’s letters on the poem. In
brief, Savitri took shape through three major phases.
(1) Before 1920, Sri Aurobindo made a number of drafts of
a narrative poem retelling in an original way the tale of Savitri
and Satyavan. Its last version had a plan of eight books in two
parts; the books were not divided into cantos. (2) In the 1930s,
he set about converting this narrative poem into an epic. For a
long time he concentrated on the description of Aswapati’s Yoga
prior to the birth of Savitri, creating by 1945 a new Part One
with three books and many cantos. (3) In the last phase, besides
revising Part One for publication, he reworked and enlarged
most of the books written in the first period. He added a book
on the Yoga of Savitri, making twelve books and forty-nine
cantos in all and completing Parts Two and Three.