Western Thinkers and Poets Interested in Indian Poetry
In the 19th century, American Transcendentalist writers and many German Romantic writers became interested in Indian poetry, literature and thought. In the 20th century, few Western poets became interested in Indian thought and literature, and the interest of many of those was minor: T. S. Eliot studied Sanskrit at Harvard, but later lost interest. Buddhism brought Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder to India, but they became more interested in Tibetan and Japanese forms of the religion. Mexican poet and writer Octavio Paz developed a strong, lasting interest in Indian poetry after living in the country as part of the Mexican diplomatic mission (and as ambassador in the 1960s). Paz married an Indian woman, translated Sanskrit kavyas, and wrote extensively about India.
Read more about this topic: Indian Poetry
Famous quotes containing the words western, thinkers, poets, interested, indian and/or poetry:
“We hold on to hopes for next year every year in western Dakota: hoping that droughts will end; hoping that our crops won’t be hailed out in the few rainstorms that come; hoping that it won’t be too windy on the day we harvest, blowing away five bushels an acre; hoping ... that if we get a fair crop, we’ll be able to get a fair price for it. Sometimes survival is the only blessing that the terrifying angel of the Plains bestows.”
—Kathleen Norris (b. 1947)
“Mr. Alcott seems to have sat down for the winter. He has got Plato and other books to read. He is as large-featured and hospitable to traveling thoughts and thinkers as ever; but with the same Connecticut philosophy as ever, mingled with what is better. If he would only stand upright and toe the line!—though he were to put off several degrees of largeness, and put on a considerable degree of littleness. After all, I think we must call him particularly your man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I was interested to see how a pioneer lived on this side of the country. His life is in some respects more adventurous than that of his brother in the West; for he contends with winter as well as the wilderness, and there is a greater interval of time at least between him and the army which is to follow. Here immigration is a tide which may ebb when it has swept away the pines; there it is not a tide, but an inundation, and roads and other improvements come steadily rushing after.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Well, that’s a nice social problem—an Indian in the family.”
—Howard Estabrook (1884–1978)
“The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and Shelley’s poetry is not entirely sane either. The Shelley of actual life is a vision of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing. And in poetry, no less than in life, he is “a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.””
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)