Poetry

Tagores poetic style, which proceeds from a lineage established by 15th and 16th century Vaishnava poets, ranges from classical formalism to the comic, visionary, and ecstatic. He was influenced by the atavistic mysticism of Vyasa and other rishi authors of the Upanishads, the Bhakti Sufi mystic Kabir, and Ramprasad Sen. Tagores most innovative and mature poetry embodies his exposure to Bengali rural folk music, which included mystic Baul ballads such as those of the bard Lalon. These, rediscovered and repopularised by Tagore, resemble 19th century Kartabhaja hymns that emphasise inward divinity and rebellion against bourgeois bhadralok religious and social orthodoxy. During his Shelaidaha years, his poems took on a lyrical voice of the moner manush, the Bauls man within the heart and Tagores life force of his deep recesses, or meditating upon the jeevan devatathe demiurge or the living God within. This figure connected with divinity through appeal to nature and the emotional interplay of human drama. Such tools saw use in his Bhanusi?ha poems chronicling the Radha Krishna romance, which were repeatedly revised over the course of seventy years. Tagore reacted to the halfhearted uptake of modernist and realist techniques in Bengali literature by writing matching experimental works in the 1930s. These include Africa and Camalia, among the better known of his latter poems. He occasionally wrote poems using Shadhu Bhasha, a Sanskritised dialect of Bengali, he later adopted a more popular dialect known as Cholti Bhasha. Other works include Manasi, Sonar Tori (Golden Boat), Balaka (Wild Geese, a name redolent of migrating souls), and Purobi. Sonar Toris most famous poem, dealing with the fleeting endurance of life and achievement, goes by the same name, hauntingly it ends Shunno nodir tire rohinu po?i Jaha chhilo loe g