The English poet and controversialist John Milton (1608-1674) was a champion of liberty and of love-centered marriage. He is chiefly famous for his epic poem "Paradise Lost" and for his defense of uncensored publication.
The lifetime of John Milton spanned an age of sophistication, controversy, dynamism, and revolution. When he was born, England was illuminated by the versatile genius of Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare, William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons, and Inigo Jones. Christopher Wren was at the height of his powers when Milton died in 1674. At that date Henry Purcell was the major composer; Isaac Newton dominated in mathematics and physics; and literature enjoyed the varied talents of John Dryden, Andrew Marvell, John Bunyan, and Samuel Pepys.
In the middle period of Milton's life, England, after two revolutionary wars, became a republic and then a protectorate under Oliver Cromwell. When monarchy and the Anglican Church were restored in 1660, mercantilist capitalism had been firmly established, and the foundations of the British Empire and navy were laid.
Background and Education
The poet's father, John Milton, Sr., emerged from a line of obscure Roman Catholic yeomen in Oxfordshire, was educated as a chorister, went to London, and became a scrivener - a profession that combined moneylender, copyist, notary, and contract lawyer. About 1600 he married Sara Jeffrey, the wealthy daughter of a merchant-tailor. Three of their children survived infancy: Anne; John, born on Dec. 9, 1608; and Christopher. Their father was not only an able man of business but a musician. He composed madrigals, choral pieces, and some hymns that are still sung. From him young John derived the love of music that pervades his works.
According to Milton's own account in his Second Defense (1654), "My father destined me while still a child for the study of humane letters, which I took up so eagerly that, from the age of twelve on, I hardly ever took to bed from my intense studies before midnight." After private tutoring, about 1620 he entered St. Paul's School, where he studied Sallust, Virgil, and Horace and the New Testament in Greek.
"After I had thus been taught several languages and had tasted the sweetness of philosophy, my father sent me to Cambridge." Admitted to Christ's College at the age of 15, he intended to become a Church of England priest. Because of a disagreement with his tutor, he was "rusticated" (temporarily expelled) in 1626. From home he wrote a Latin poem to his best friend, Charles Diodati, about the joys of exile - reading, plays, walks, and girl watching.
Back at Cambridge about April 1626, Milton was assigned a different tutor and resumed the study of logic, ethics, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. He composed Latin poems on the deaths of prominent men, some antipopish epigrams, and In quintum Novembris (On the Fifth of November), a melodramatic little epic on the Gunpowder Plot. In 1628 his first major English poem, "On the Death of a Fair Infant, Dying of the Cough," was occasioned by the death of his sister's baby. A year later, in images of light and music, "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" celebrated the harmonizing power of divine love.
In one of his Prolusions (college orations), Milton digressed into English verse, beginning "Hail native language." Thereafter he wrote Latin verse occasionally and a series of sonnets in Italian, but he composed increasingly in English, his tone ranging from the humor of a mock epitaph, "On the University Carrier," to somber dignity in "An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester." The companion poems "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" contrasted the pleasures of the "joyful man" with the more serious ones of the "contemplative man," thus revealing the complementary sides of Milton's own nature.
The Graceful Thirties
After receiving the bachelor of arts and the master of arts degrees in 1629 and 1632, Milton lived in his family's suburban home in Hammersmith and then at its country estate in Horton, Buckinghamshire, continuing studies in theology, history, mathematics, and literature but participating in social and cultural life in London and the country. The presence of his "On Shakespeare" in the 1632 folio of Shakespeare's plays suggests that Milton was in touch with actors. In his sonnet "How Soon hath Time," Milton modestly lamented his lack of accomplishments in 23 years; but he was soon writing lyrics for his Arcades, an entertainment. In 1634 A Mask (better known as Comus) was performed at Ludlow Castle, with music by Henry Lawes. This mixture of song, dance, pageantry, and poetry is imbued with youthful charm and glorifies the purity of chastity with exquisite lyricism; but with his characteristic readiness to do justice to opposing viewpoints, Milton did not neglect to put an attractive case for seduction into the mouth of his epicurean villain. Thus Milton began his concentration on temptation themes.
Milton's themes were both particular and universal. Lycidas (1637), a pastoral elegy occasioned by the death of a promising young acquaintance, dealt with why God allows the good to die young and asked if, instead of dedicating one's self to study and writing, it would not be better to do as others do and "sport with Amaryllis in the shade." Milton's answer was that "laborious days" are not wasted: eternal life lies ahead. In 1639, when he learned that his friend Diodati had died, he penned a moving Latin elegy, finding solace in Christian hope and resolution for his grief in esthetic expression. The poem also served as an outlet for a condemnation of negligent clergymen. Though Milton had abandoned the idea of entering the ministry, he was dedicated to making the Church of England more Protestant.
In 1638-1639 Milton toured France and Italy. His short but well-formed body, long auburn hair, blue eyes, and fair skin enhanced his intellectual vivacity and graceful manners. His earnest enthusiasms and versatility in languages also conduced to his being welcomed into polite society abroad. He intended to go to Greece, but news of the growing political and religious crisis in England led him to return to London so that he could help to advance liberty if his talents were needed. In the meantime he tutored his nephews and other students.
Crucial Decades, 1640-1660
It was by writing prose that Milton found opportunity to serve his God and country. In 1641-1642 he poured out tracts opposing the bishops' control over religion. In his judgment, their powers were based on man-made traditions, self-interest, and a combination of ignorance, superstition, and deliberate falsification.
Part of what Milton regarded as episcopal tyranny was the regulation of marriage by canon law and the bishops' courts. In his Commonplace Book (classified notes based on his reading), he had already shown interest in divorce, before Mary Powell became his wife about May 1642. She was about half his age and came from an Oxfordshire family. A few months later, while she was on a visit to her parents, the civil war between King and Parliament erupted. Her family were royalists living in royalist territory, whereas Milton's attacks on the bishops had committed him to the rebels. Accordingly, she failed to return to him despite his urgings. Under these circumstances his publishing a series of pamphlets on divorce (1643-1645) was hardly tactful; but if Mary read them, she discovered that, instead of urging England to follow Protestant example abroad and permit divorce for adultery, desertion, and nonconsummation, Milton emphasized the spiritual and mental aspects of marriage: he held that what is essential is neither physical nor sacramental nor contractual but lies in marital love, in the union of what distinguishes human beings from animals - their rational souls. Milton taught that if such compatibility was lacking and could not be achieved after sincere effort, all concerned should recognize the right of divorce, inasmuch as God had not joined such an ill-yoked couple. However, it is doubtful that Milton regarded his own marriage in such a light, for in 1645 he forgave a repentant Mary - she blamed her mother - and as far as is known they lived contentedly together until she died in 1652.
In 1644 Milton's "Of Education" dealt with another kind of domestic freedom, how to develop in schoolboys discipline, reasonableness, broad culture, all-round ability, and independence of judgment. The same year saw Areopagitica, his defense of man's right to free speech and discussion as the best means of advancing truth. To this end he opposed prepublication censorship though admitting that if a book or those responsible for it broke clear and reasonable laws against libel, pornography, blasphemy, or sedition, the work could be repressed or those responsible for it could be fairly tried and punished if found guilty. Milton advocated neither licentiousness or avoidable interference with individuals but, rather, responsible freedom under just laws and magistrates.
The divorce tracts made Milton undeservedly notorious as a fanatic libertine advocate of free love. Readers of his collected Poems (1645) were therefore probably surprised to find the charming seriousness of an author who, had he died then, might have been ranked with George Herbert and Robert Herrick as an Anglican poet. The volume contained not only the poems mentioned above but also exquisite lyrics such as "On a May Morning" and "At a Solemn Musick." Milton also put new life into the sonnet genre, investing it with wider subject matter.
As the civil war drew to a close, Milton turned from defending the liberty of religion, marriage, and publication to condemning royal tyranny. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) argued that men have a natural right to freedom and that contracts they make with rulers are voluntary and terminable. Soon after its publication he began a decade as the revolutionary government's secretary for foreign tongues: his chief duty was to put state letters into choice Latin. His next pamphlet, Eikonoklastes (1649), answered "The King's Book," a self-justification attributed to Charles I. This was followed by two Defenses of the English People (1651, 1654) to explain why they revolted and a Defense of Himself (1655) against various attackers. These works were in Latin: Milton was the revolution's chief international propagandist.
For some years Milton had been losing his eyesight, and by early 1652 he was totally blind. Reflecting that this could prevent the use of his talent in God's service, he composed the sonnet "When I consider how my light is spent" with its famous conclusion, "They also serve who only stand and wait."
In 1656, four years after his first wife's death, Milton married Kathrine Woodcock. Two years later she died as a result of childbirth, and he tenderly memorialized her in a sonnet, "To my late departed Saint."
Despite adversities Milton heroically persisted. During the crisis preceding restoration of the monarchy he dictated several tracts. In A Treatise of Civil Power (1659) he again urged toleration and separation of Church and state. Ready and Easy Way (1660) argued for preservation of a republic.
Triumph in Defeat
Inevitably the eloquent defender of monarchy's overthrow was in acute danger when Charles II, son of the executed Charles I, regained the throne in 1660. Milton was harassed and imprisoned; his seditious books were publically burned; but he was included in a general pardon. In 1663 he married Elizabeth Minshell. In 1667, Paradise Lost, his long-planned epic on the fall of man, was published. In 1671 its sequel, Paradise Regained, appeared in one volume with Samson Agonistes, a tragedy modeled on Greek drama and the Book of Job. Milton also published some previously written prose works on grammar, logic, and early British history; his Prolusions with some familiar letters; and an enlarged edition of his earlier Poems. In 1673 he reentered public controversy with Of True Religion, a brief defense of Protestantism. Before his death about Nov. 8, 1674, he was planning to publish writings that appeared posthumously: his Latin state papers (1676) and a short history of Moscovia (1682). In 1694 his nephew Edward Phillips published a life of his uncle with an English translation of the state papers.
In the early 19th century the Latin manuscript of Milton's Christian Doctrine was discovered and translated (1825). In it he systematically set out to disencumber scriptural interpretation from misinterpretation by discovering what the Bible itself said on such matters as predestination, angels, and saving faith. One of his central convictions was that what God accommodated to limited human understandings was sufficient and that man should not impose on what God left vague a precision unjustified by what He revealed.
Paradise Lost was not suspected of unorthodoxy by centuries of Protestant readers, and, except for a few jabs at Roman Catholicism, it has universally appealed to Christians. However, because Satan is portrayed with a rebelliousness against the nature of things that dissidents find attractive, the poets William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley and other "Satanists" alleged that Milton was knowingly or unknowingly on the side of the devils. Their notion is evidence of the epic's tremendous imaginative power. In majestic blank-verse paragraphs it relates the whole of history from the Son's generation, through the war in heaven, the fall of the rebel angels, the creation, and man's fall, to a vision of the future, Satan's final defeat, and the establishment of Christ's kingdom. Milton did not intend most of it to be taken literally: it is largely a product of his imagination, inspired by, but not directly based on, the Bible. Paradise Lost is a fictionalized, imaginative attempt to dramatize approximations of complex truths. Underlying the fictive is Milton's effort to convey to his fellowmen some insight into God's wisdom and providence.
Paradise Regained, a far shorter epic, treats the rejection by Jesus of Satan's temptations. Its central point is that the true hero conquers not by force but by humility and faith in God. Like the two epics and Comus, Samson Agonistes treats the theme of temptation, dramatizing how the Hebrew strong man overtrusted himself and, like Eve and Adam, yielded to passion and seeming self-interest.
Reputation and Influence
For a few decades after his death, Milton was damned as a rebel and divorcer. But since then reformers and revolutionaries have been inspired by his works, especially Areopagitica. His influence on poets has been tremendous, though not always beneficial. John Dryden partially based his Achitophel on Milton's Satan and so admired Paradise Lost that he recast it as an opera, The Fall of Man. Joseph Addison in the Spectator demonstrated that Milton ranked with Homer and Virgil. Alexander Pope delightfully satirized some features of Paradise Lost in The Rape of the Lock. In The Lives of the Poets Samuel Johnson somewhat grudgingly conceded Milton's achievement as a poet but was so prejudiced by his royalist, Anglican sympathies that he portrayed Milton as a domestic tyrant. In general, 18th-century poets lauded him for sublimity. William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley exalted his Satan as a romantic rebel. William Wordsworth, viewing the poet as a liberator, wrote, "Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour." Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his critical writings praised Milton's artistry and profundity. John Keats and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, were perhaps overinfluenced by his poetry. The Victorians put Paradise Lost alongside the Bible in their parlors for Sunday reading; and Milton's great 19th-century biographer, David Masson, transformed him into Victorian solidity.
Milton's poetic reputation remained high until the 1920s, when there was an adverse reaction from T.S. Eliot and other poet-critics. Somewhat oddly, they condemned his verse chiefly because of its influence. But the academic critics came to the rescue, and since about 1930 Milton studies have been revolutionized. He has been restored to a high eminence, though both his personality and works are still much controverted. Indeed, he has been extraordinarily successful in his aim of stimulating seminal discussion. However, the notion that he was sour and puritanical dies slowly. As a corrective, it is well to remember how his own daughter remembered him: "She said He was Delightful Company, the Life of the Conversation, and That on Account of a Flow of Subject and an Unaffected Chearfulness and Civility."
A Further Reading
The standard biography is Milton: A Life (2 vols., 1968), by William Riley Parker. The most inclusive edition is The Works, prepared by general editor Frank Allen Patterson (18 vols., 1931-1938), known as The Columbia Milton. However, for the nonpoetic writings, Complete Prose Works, prepared by general editor Don M. Wolfe (8 vols., 1953 and later), is more reliable. For the poetry, the most accurate texts are provided in editions by Helen Gardner (2 vols., 1952-1955), Douglas Bush (1965), John Carey and Alastair Fowler (heavily annotated, 1968), and John T. Shawcross (rev. ed. 1971). The Prose, edited by J. Max Patrick (1967), includes generous selections, a survey of all the prose works, and annotations. The Student's Milton, edited by F.A. Patterson (1930), gives all the poetry and most of the prose in one volume with few notes (1930). The Complete Poems and Major Prose, edited by Merritt Y. Hughes (1957), is widely used as a textbook.
A brief, sound entree for the beginner is Douglas Bush, John Milton: A Sketch of His Life and Writings (1964). The general reader may prefer John Milton, Englishman, by James Holly Hanford (1949), but students will find wider guidance in A Milton Handbook by Hanford and James A. Taafe (5th ed. 1970).
The best treatment of Milton's prose in its intellectual context is Milton and the Puritan Dilemma by Arthur E. Barker (repr. 1956); he edited Milton: Modern Essays in Criticism (1965), an excellent introduction to 20th-century approaches to the poetry, with guidance for further reading. Milton's Epic Poetry, edited by C.A. Patrides (1967), contains a variety of essays and an annotated reading list.
Except for Shakespeare, more scholarship and criticism is devoted to Milton than to any other English author. In general, works published before about 1930 have been superseded. Among the best are the books by James Holly Hanford, John M. Steadman, Joseph Summers, Stanley Fish, Merritt Y. Hughes, Kester Svendsen, Don Cameron Allen, E. M. W. Tillyard, Rosemond Tuve, William Riley Parker, A. S. P. Woodhouse, F. Michael Krouse, Louis Martz, and Barbara Lewalski; however, this list is highly selective. The biographies, guides, and editions listed above usually suggest further reading. For fuller guidance see Calvin Huckabay, John Milton: An Annotated Bibliography (rev. ed. 1969).
Old London Bridge - Only for Poets
Connecting the Poets who digging heart of me Still death - Sabarnasri
HEARTY WELCOME & HAVE A NICE STAY
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Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Tagore's Life
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a Bengali poet, philosopher, social reformer, and dramatist who came into international prominence when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913.
Rabindranath Tagore or simply Rabindranath as he is known in India, was born into an affluent and brilliantly talented Calcutta family on May 7, 1861. His grandfather Dwarkanath Tagore (1794-1846) had amassed great wealth through investment and speculation in coal mines, indigo, and sugar. Despite the fact that the family was an outcast Brahmin one, belonging to the group called pirali brahman - Brahmins who had been made ritually impure by sometimes forced contact with Moslems - the dynasty he founded gave Bengal and all of India some of its most prominent painters, poets, musicians, and religious leaders.
Family and Schooling
Dwarkanath's own views were iconoclastic; his wife left him, for example, because he had violated Hindu practice by eating meat. Rabindranath's father, Debendranath (1818-1905), was outstanding in fields of learning ranging from mathematics to ancient scripture and was a man of profound religious concern. He was one of the founders of the religious society called the Brahmo Samaj, which, confronted by Christianity, attempted to purge popular Hinduism of "idolatry" and to reconstruct the "pure monotheism" of classical Indian religion.
The house in which Rabindranath grew up was the home of a vast joint, or extended, family; there were sometimes as many as 200 Tagores living in the complex known as Jorasanko, in northern Calcutta. These included the painters Abinindranath and Gaganendranath and, among Rabindranath's own 11 elder brothers and sisters, the writer and philosopher Dvijendranath, the musician Jyotirindranath, and Bengal's first woman novelist, Svarnakumari Devi, who also edited a literary magazine.
With his father frequently away and his mother ill, Rabindranath was cared for in his early childhood largely by servants and teachers who confined him strictly, breeding in him, as he later wrote, a longing for the freedom of the outside world and a detestation of conventional and restrictive scholastic education. The boy showed unmistakable poetic talent, and as early as 8 he was urged by his brothers and cousins to express himself in poetry. This encouragement, which continued throughout his formative years, caused his talent to flourish. And when he was 11, his father took him on a trip to upper India and the Himalaya Mountains. Alone in the mountains, Debendranath instructed him in Sanskrit, English, and astronomy and taught him the ancient Hindu religious texts.
Such attention from his distinguished father, together with his own talent, brought him to the forefront of his extraordinary family. Rabindranath's first public recitation of his poetry came when he was 14 at a Bengali cultural and nationalistic festival organized by his brothers; his poem on the greatness of India's past, expressing sorrow at its present state, under British rule, was acclaimed. When he was 17, his brother Satyendranath, the first Indian ever admitted to the Indian civil service, took him on a trip to England; and the pattern of his life was established. These three elements occur throughout his life: a profound desire for freedom, both personal and national; an idea of the greatness of Asia's, and especially India's, contribution to the world of the spirit; and poetry expressing both of these.
Social Consciousness
Although Rabindranath cherished freedom and had great pride in India and in Bengal, his gentle heart caused him to withdraw from the radical political activity with which many of his countrymen were trying to drive the British from their shores. Like Mohandas Gandhi, whom he knew well, Rabindranath abhorred terrorism; but he could not agree even with Gandhi on such political moves as boycott and burning of British-made goods. Rabindranath chose to express himself in other, more personal ways, such as resigning in 1919 the knighthood which he had received from the British crown and establishing a school and later a university at Shantiniketan, the ideals of which were education in a free atmosphere, in the open air, untrammeled by traditional restrictions, and the participation of students from all countries in common experience.
Rabindranath's social consciousness showed itself in many other ways as well. He spent many years as overseer of his family's vast estates in East Bengal and during that time worked hard for the betterment of the tenant farmers, being repaid by learning to know and love the songs and poetry of the people of the countryside; the folk arts of rural Bengal deeply influenced his own later work. And his experimental village called Sriniketan anticipated by many years the Village Development Program instituted by independent India and paralleled Gandhi's own experiments with the village as a viable economic and social unit.
Literary Fame
Rabindranath's ideas of Asia's unity, and later of the unity of the world, and his longing for personal freedom were both expressed in his continual and almost compulsive travel-to Japan, China, Europe, and the United States. In all of these places he lectured and wrote, and it was on one trip to England in 1912 that he fatefully found himself in the company of William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound. He had prepared some prose versions of his Bengali collection of poems called Gitanjali (Song Offerings), religious poems for the most part of a lyrical and devotional sort very much akin to the songs of the ancient Hindu sect called Vaishnava. These he read to Yeats, who was entranced by them; and Pound, then representing Harriet Munroe's Poetry magazine of Chicago, cabled the editor to hold the next edition for the inclusion of some "very wonderful" poems by Tagore. Gitanjali was then published as a book, with an introduction by Yeats, and in 1913 came the Nobel Prize.
Rabindranath looked upon the award as a mixed blessing. In the years previous to its receipt he had retired more and more from the world to devote himself to writing, and he foresaw, correctly, that his peace would be disturbed by fame. He was beleaguered not only in his homeland, where the people, their pride rubbed raw by British dominance, suddenly saw him as a hero, but especially in the United States, where the atmosphere was right for the advent of a tall, handsome, whiterobed, and bearded wise man from the East. The reaction in India he greeted with disappointment; he saw his sudden prominence as nothing more than shallow chauvinism. And his reaction to the West's acclaim was confusion: he began to wonder whether India was as spiritual, and the West as materialistic, as he had thought. And this doubt was compounded by the fact that he had to look to the West for material support of his many projects, although he longed to live a simple life in the groves and fields of his "golden Bengal."
The deaths of almost all of his beloved immediate family in rapid succession, and painful illness, did not diminish Rabindranath's spirit. Until his death he remained a simple, tender man full of humor and love of life, deep in his sympathy, and strong in his ideals. His last poems, some of them dictated when he became too weak to hold a pen, show his love of nature and of man. He died on Aug. 7, 1941, in Calcutta.
Multifaceted Man
It would be a mistake to consider Rabindranath, as many, especially in the West, do, as only a poet. Late in his life he took up brush and ink, and his moody and often humorous wash drawings are a unique contribution to modern Indian art. Collections of essays like The Religion of Man and Sadhana (originally a series of lectures at Harvard) are thoughtful and provocative additions to the huge religious and philosophical literature of India. The essays in Toward Universal Man show him as a social and political theorist.
Such novels as Gora, Seser kavita (Farewell My Friend) and Ghare baire (The Home and the World) demonstrate not only Rabindranath's skill with the novel form but, even in translation, some of the innovations he brought to the Bengali novel: social realism, colloquial dialogue, light satire, and psychologically motivated plot development. His dramas, one of which was produced on Broadway as The King of the Dark Chamber, sometimes bordering on whimsy and fantasy, are often complex political or social commentary. His stories, some of the best of which are collected in translation under the title The Housewarming and Other Stories, range from ghost stories to lighthearted humor to scathing social satire to gentle warmth, the last being illustrated by the famous Kabuliwalla (The Man from Kabul).
An accomplished musician, Rabindranath was a vocal performer as well as composer. He developed a new style of vocal music which is called, after him, Rabindra-sangit. Never afraid to break the canons of the rigidly structured classical music of India, Rabindranath combined ragas (modes in the classical tradition strictly associated with time and place), brought in elements of the folk music of boatmen and wandering religious, mingled these with semiclassical forms of love songs, and drew from it all a unique style and form of music immensely popular on every level of Bengali society.
Themes of His Poetry
The words of the songs too were his own. Through them, in a way traditional to his culture but with a spirit unique to him, he expressed his love of God and man, his vision of the beauties of nature and the human heart, and his pride in his native land. The images he used were sometimes the old religious ones of the love between man and woman as representative of the love between man and God; sometimes they were the earthy images of the boatmen of the vast rivers or the country marketplace; and sometimes they were drawn from the complex life of Calcutta. They were always images which touched something deep in the hearts and memories of the Bengali people.
One of the aspects of Rabindranath's genius is his use of the Bengali language, for his musician's ear caught natural rhythms and his free mind paid little attention to classical rules of poetry. The forms he created were new; and even in the poetry which he intended to be read rather than sung, rhythms, internal rhyme and alliteration, and a peculiar sonorousness almost make the poems sing themselves. These are things that cannot even be suggested in translation. The translations of Rabindranath's poetry available in English are hardly representative of his total work. Gitanjali, on which his reputation in the West is largely based, shows nothing of the humor, for example, or intellectual rigor of which he was capable. Rabindranath's published work is largely, though not completely, contained in 26 substantial volumes.
It is sometimes said that Rabindranath was the last of the great traditional Indian poets. It is true that despite his independence of mind he looked for his inspiration to the past, to nature, and that his theme is man's relation to these and to God; he was never consumed with the complexities of psychology, as many poets who followed him in Bengal have been. He may have achieved his great and lasting popularity just because he was a poet of hope. Toward the end of his life he was stricken with horror by the Nazi march through Europe and Japan's ravages in China. And yet the keynote of his life was struck in such lines as these, from his collection called Kaplana:
"Even though slow and sluggish/ evening comes, / and stops as with a gesture/ your song;/ even though you are alone/ in the infinite sky, / and your body weary, / and in terror you utter/ a silent mantra/ to horizons hidden by the veil-/ bird, O my bird, / though it is darkening/ do not fold your wings."
Further Reading
A useful selection of Rabindranath's writings is Amiya Chakravarty, ed., A Tagore Reader (1961). Rabindranath Tagore, 1861-1961: A Centenary Volume, published by Sahitya Akademi (1968), contains translations of selected pieces, numerous and mostly adulatory essays by friends and critics, and reproductions of Rabindranath's art. Several biographies of Rabindranath are Marjorie Sykes, Rabindranath Tagore (1943); Krishna Kripalani, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (1962); and G. D. Khanolkar, The Lute and the Plough: A Life of Rabindranath Tagore (trans. 1963). Critical studies of his work include Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore (1918); John E. Thompson, Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Dramatist (2d rev. ed. 1948); Benay G. Ray, The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore (1949); Sisirkumar Ghose, The Later Poems of Tagore (1961); and Stephen Hay, Asian Ideas of East and West: Tagore and His Critics in Japan, China, and India (1970).
(born May 7, 1861, Calcutta, India — died Aug. 7, 1941, Calcutta) Bengali poet, writer, composer, and painter. The son of Debendranath Tagore, he published several books of poetry, including Manasi, in his 20s. His later religious poetry was introduced to the West in Gitanjali (1912). Through international travel and lecturing, he introduced aspects of Indian culture to the West and vice versa. He spoke ardently in favour of Indian independence; as a protest against the Massacre of Amritsar, he repudiated the knighthood he had received in 1915. He founded an experimental school in Bengal where he sought to blend Eastern and Western philosophies; it became Vishva-Bharati University (1921). He was awarded the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Rabindranath Tagore or simply Rabindranath as he is known in India, was born into an affluent and brilliantly talented Calcutta family on May 7, 1861. His grandfather Dwarkanath Tagore (1794-1846) had amassed great wealth through investment and speculation in coal mines, indigo, and sugar. Despite the fact that the family was an outcast Brahmin one, belonging to the group called pirali brahman - Brahmins who had been made ritually impure by sometimes forced contact with Moslems - the dynasty he founded gave Bengal and all of India some of its most prominent painters, poets, musicians, and religious leaders.
Family and Schooling
Dwarkanath's own views were iconoclastic; his wife left him, for example, because he had violated Hindu practice by eating meat. Rabindranath's father, Debendranath (1818-1905), was outstanding in fields of learning ranging from mathematics to ancient scripture and was a man of profound religious concern. He was one of the founders of the religious society called the Brahmo Samaj, which, confronted by Christianity, attempted to purge popular Hinduism of "idolatry" and to reconstruct the "pure monotheism" of classical Indian religion.
The house in which Rabindranath grew up was the home of a vast joint, or extended, family; there were sometimes as many as 200 Tagores living in the complex known as Jorasanko, in northern Calcutta. These included the painters Abinindranath and Gaganendranath and, among Rabindranath's own 11 elder brothers and sisters, the writer and philosopher Dvijendranath, the musician Jyotirindranath, and Bengal's first woman novelist, Svarnakumari Devi, who also edited a literary magazine.
With his father frequently away and his mother ill, Rabindranath was cared for in his early childhood largely by servants and teachers who confined him strictly, breeding in him, as he later wrote, a longing for the freedom of the outside world and a detestation of conventional and restrictive scholastic education. The boy showed unmistakable poetic talent, and as early as 8 he was urged by his brothers and cousins to express himself in poetry. This encouragement, which continued throughout his formative years, caused his talent to flourish. And when he was 11, his father took him on a trip to upper India and the Himalaya Mountains. Alone in the mountains, Debendranath instructed him in Sanskrit, English, and astronomy and taught him the ancient Hindu religious texts.
Such attention from his distinguished father, together with his own talent, brought him to the forefront of his extraordinary family. Rabindranath's first public recitation of his poetry came when he was 14 at a Bengali cultural and nationalistic festival organized by his brothers; his poem on the greatness of India's past, expressing sorrow at its present state, under British rule, was acclaimed. When he was 17, his brother Satyendranath, the first Indian ever admitted to the Indian civil service, took him on a trip to England; and the pattern of his life was established. These three elements occur throughout his life: a profound desire for freedom, both personal and national; an idea of the greatness of Asia's, and especially India's, contribution to the world of the spirit; and poetry expressing both of these.
Social Consciousness
Although Rabindranath cherished freedom and had great pride in India and in Bengal, his gentle heart caused him to withdraw from the radical political activity with which many of his countrymen were trying to drive the British from their shores. Like Mohandas Gandhi, whom he knew well, Rabindranath abhorred terrorism; but he could not agree even with Gandhi on such political moves as boycott and burning of British-made goods. Rabindranath chose to express himself in other, more personal ways, such as resigning in 1919 the knighthood which he had received from the British crown and establishing a school and later a university at Shantiniketan, the ideals of which were education in a free atmosphere, in the open air, untrammeled by traditional restrictions, and the participation of students from all countries in common experience.
Rabindranath's social consciousness showed itself in many other ways as well. He spent many years as overseer of his family's vast estates in East Bengal and during that time worked hard for the betterment of the tenant farmers, being repaid by learning to know and love the songs and poetry of the people of the countryside; the folk arts of rural Bengal deeply influenced his own later work. And his experimental village called Sriniketan anticipated by many years the Village Development Program instituted by independent India and paralleled Gandhi's own experiments with the village as a viable economic and social unit.
Literary Fame
Rabindranath's ideas of Asia's unity, and later of the unity of the world, and his longing for personal freedom were both expressed in his continual and almost compulsive travel-to Japan, China, Europe, and the United States. In all of these places he lectured and wrote, and it was on one trip to England in 1912 that he fatefully found himself in the company of William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound. He had prepared some prose versions of his Bengali collection of poems called Gitanjali (Song Offerings), religious poems for the most part of a lyrical and devotional sort very much akin to the songs of the ancient Hindu sect called Vaishnava. These he read to Yeats, who was entranced by them; and Pound, then representing Harriet Munroe's Poetry magazine of Chicago, cabled the editor to hold the next edition for the inclusion of some "very wonderful" poems by Tagore. Gitanjali was then published as a book, with an introduction by Yeats, and in 1913 came the Nobel Prize.
Rabindranath looked upon the award as a mixed blessing. In the years previous to its receipt he had retired more and more from the world to devote himself to writing, and he foresaw, correctly, that his peace would be disturbed by fame. He was beleaguered not only in his homeland, where the people, their pride rubbed raw by British dominance, suddenly saw him as a hero, but especially in the United States, where the atmosphere was right for the advent of a tall, handsome, whiterobed, and bearded wise man from the East. The reaction in India he greeted with disappointment; he saw his sudden prominence as nothing more than shallow chauvinism. And his reaction to the West's acclaim was confusion: he began to wonder whether India was as spiritual, and the West as materialistic, as he had thought. And this doubt was compounded by the fact that he had to look to the West for material support of his many projects, although he longed to live a simple life in the groves and fields of his "golden Bengal."
The deaths of almost all of his beloved immediate family in rapid succession, and painful illness, did not diminish Rabindranath's spirit. Until his death he remained a simple, tender man full of humor and love of life, deep in his sympathy, and strong in his ideals. His last poems, some of them dictated when he became too weak to hold a pen, show his love of nature and of man. He died on Aug. 7, 1941, in Calcutta.
Multifaceted Man
It would be a mistake to consider Rabindranath, as many, especially in the West, do, as only a poet. Late in his life he took up brush and ink, and his moody and often humorous wash drawings are a unique contribution to modern Indian art. Collections of essays like The Religion of Man and Sadhana (originally a series of lectures at Harvard) are thoughtful and provocative additions to the huge religious and philosophical literature of India. The essays in Toward Universal Man show him as a social and political theorist.
Such novels as Gora, Seser kavita (Farewell My Friend) and Ghare baire (The Home and the World) demonstrate not only Rabindranath's skill with the novel form but, even in translation, some of the innovations he brought to the Bengali novel: social realism, colloquial dialogue, light satire, and psychologically motivated plot development. His dramas, one of which was produced on Broadway as The King of the Dark Chamber, sometimes bordering on whimsy and fantasy, are often complex political or social commentary. His stories, some of the best of which are collected in translation under the title The Housewarming and Other Stories, range from ghost stories to lighthearted humor to scathing social satire to gentle warmth, the last being illustrated by the famous Kabuliwalla (The Man from Kabul).
An accomplished musician, Rabindranath was a vocal performer as well as composer. He developed a new style of vocal music which is called, after him, Rabindra-sangit. Never afraid to break the canons of the rigidly structured classical music of India, Rabindranath combined ragas (modes in the classical tradition strictly associated with time and place), brought in elements of the folk music of boatmen and wandering religious, mingled these with semiclassical forms of love songs, and drew from it all a unique style and form of music immensely popular on every level of Bengali society.
Themes of His Poetry
The words of the songs too were his own. Through them, in a way traditional to his culture but with a spirit unique to him, he expressed his love of God and man, his vision of the beauties of nature and the human heart, and his pride in his native land. The images he used were sometimes the old religious ones of the love between man and woman as representative of the love between man and God; sometimes they were the earthy images of the boatmen of the vast rivers or the country marketplace; and sometimes they were drawn from the complex life of Calcutta. They were always images which touched something deep in the hearts and memories of the Bengali people.
One of the aspects of Rabindranath's genius is his use of the Bengali language, for his musician's ear caught natural rhythms and his free mind paid little attention to classical rules of poetry. The forms he created were new; and even in the poetry which he intended to be read rather than sung, rhythms, internal rhyme and alliteration, and a peculiar sonorousness almost make the poems sing themselves. These are things that cannot even be suggested in translation. The translations of Rabindranath's poetry available in English are hardly representative of his total work. Gitanjali, on which his reputation in the West is largely based, shows nothing of the humor, for example, or intellectual rigor of which he was capable. Rabindranath's published work is largely, though not completely, contained in 26 substantial volumes.
It is sometimes said that Rabindranath was the last of the great traditional Indian poets. It is true that despite his independence of mind he looked for his inspiration to the past, to nature, and that his theme is man's relation to these and to God; he was never consumed with the complexities of psychology, as many poets who followed him in Bengal have been. He may have achieved his great and lasting popularity just because he was a poet of hope. Toward the end of his life he was stricken with horror by the Nazi march through Europe and Japan's ravages in China. And yet the keynote of his life was struck in such lines as these, from his collection called Kaplana:
"Even though slow and sluggish/ evening comes, / and stops as with a gesture/ your song;/ even though you are alone/ in the infinite sky, / and your body weary, / and in terror you utter/ a silent mantra/ to horizons hidden by the veil-/ bird, O my bird, / though it is darkening/ do not fold your wings."
Further Reading
A useful selection of Rabindranath's writings is Amiya Chakravarty, ed., A Tagore Reader (1961). Rabindranath Tagore, 1861-1961: A Centenary Volume, published by Sahitya Akademi (1968), contains translations of selected pieces, numerous and mostly adulatory essays by friends and critics, and reproductions of Rabindranath's art. Several biographies of Rabindranath are Marjorie Sykes, Rabindranath Tagore (1943); Krishna Kripalani, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (1962); and G. D. Khanolkar, The Lute and the Plough: A Life of Rabindranath Tagore (trans. 1963). Critical studies of his work include Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore (1918); John E. Thompson, Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Dramatist (2d rev. ed. 1948); Benay G. Ray, The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore (1949); Sisirkumar Ghose, The Later Poems of Tagore (1961); and Stephen Hay, Asian Ideas of East and West: Tagore and His Critics in Japan, China, and India (1970).
(born May 7, 1861, Calcutta, India — died Aug. 7, 1941, Calcutta) Bengali poet, writer, composer, and painter. The son of Debendranath Tagore, he published several books of poetry, including Manasi, in his 20s. His later religious poetry was introduced to the West in Gitanjali (1912). Through international travel and lecturing, he introduced aspects of Indian culture to the West and vice versa. He spoke ardently in favour of Indian independence; as a protest against the Massacre of Amritsar, he repudiated the knighthood he had received in 1915. He founded an experimental school in Bengal where he sought to blend Eastern and Western philosophies; it became Vishva-Bharati University (1921). He was awarded the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Keats Life
Biography: John Keats,
Born: 31 October 1795
Birthplace: Near London, England
Died : 23 February 1821 (tuberculosis)
Best Known As: Romantic poet who wrote "Ode to a Nightingale"
John Keats is considered one of the greatest English poets of the 19th century, the author of Romantic classics such as "Endymion" and "Ode to a Nightingale." Keats began his career as a surgeon's apprentice, but gave up medicine for literary pursuits in 1814. With the help of Percy Shelley, Keats published his first collection in 1817. His productive years between 1818 and 1820 yielded some of his best-known poems, including "Lamia," "the Eve of St. Agnes" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn." In 1821 he left England and went to Italy for health reasons, but died a few months later, leaving his epic poem "Hyperion" unfinished. In his short life he influenced many English poets, and his vivid imagery and sensual style later had an impact on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of painters that included Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Keats had a famously intense love affair with Fanny Brawne, to whom he was engaged but never married.
Born: 31 October 1795
Birthplace: Near London, England
Died : 23 February 1821 (tuberculosis)
Best Known As: Romantic poet who wrote "Ode to a Nightingale"
John Keats is considered one of the greatest English poets of the 19th century, the author of Romantic classics such as "Endymion" and "Ode to a Nightingale." Keats began his career as a surgeon's apprentice, but gave up medicine for literary pursuits in 1814. With the help of Percy Shelley, Keats published his first collection in 1817. His productive years between 1818 and 1820 yielded some of his best-known poems, including "Lamia," "the Eve of St. Agnes" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn." In 1821 he left England and went to Italy for health reasons, but died a few months later, leaving his epic poem "Hyperion" unfinished. In his short life he influenced many English poets, and his vivid imagery and sensual style later had an impact on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of painters that included Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Keats had a famously intense love affair with Fanny Brawne, to whom he was engaged but never married.
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