Reading Toru Dutt as a ‘Romantic’ Urban Nature Poet

Sing his name, o dear, who in this far land Sings your name in all his songs for Bengal. Michael Madhusudan Dutt, ‘Kapatakkha River’. This essay reads nineteenth-century poet Toru Dutt’s work as a Bengali author’s successful attempt to write the Romantic sonnet in English, but within a Bengali context. Dutt achieves this both by being influenced by, and deviating from, the poetics of the British Romantics. The poems in focus are ‘Sonnet — Baugmaree’ and ‘Sonnet — The Lotus’,

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“A Shadow of a Magnitude”: Toru Dutt’s Writing and Nineteenth-Century Cross-Cultural Dialogue

This is an ode to one of those poets of the world literary tradition whose work captured and immortalized the everlasting magnanimity of the natural world, in the spirit of the Romantic poets of the nineteenth century, who strived for excellence in the literary arts, whose life was like a temporal spring that came to an end at the time when it was blossoming; like the nightingale’s voice of Keats’ poem, or the ‘golden autumn’ of Chatterton’s. Yet it was

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