Title: Influence of British Romanticism in Bengali Poetry: A Comparative-textual Analysis
Authors: Md Parves Sikder
Volume: 9
Issue: 10
Pages: 377-381
Publication Date: 2025/10/28
Abstract:
This study examines the influence of British Romanticism on Bengali poetry through a comparative-textual analysis of Jibanananda Das's "Banalata Sen". Using close reading and intertextual comparison with Wordsworth, Keats, and Coleridge, the study maps thematic and stylistic correspondences across four Romantic vectors: (a) nature and nostalgia as refuges from historical pressure; (b) melancholy and solitude as modes of self-knowledge; (c) supernaturalism and imagination at the dream-reality threshold; and (d) the timeless journey as an existential quest through memory and history. The analysis shows that Das does not reproduce Romantic templates; he reconfigures them within a Bengali modernist idiom, marked by local toponyms, riverine imagery, lucid diction, and a feminine mediator of vision, thereby achieving aesthetic autonomy while engaging global traditions. The study positions 'Banalata Sen' as a paradigmatic instance of transnational Romantic modernism, demonstrating how Romantic attitudes and techniques migrated beyond Europe and were revoiced in twentieth-century Bengal. It contributes to Romantic and South Asian literary studies by clarifying the mechanisms of influence, adaptation, and renewal that sustain Romanticism's afterlife.