Poetry Guide: Bengali Poetry

Like the Bengali language Bengali poetry finds its lineage to Pali and other Prakrit socio-cultural traditions. An antagonism to Vedic rituals and laws heightened to a culmination in the Buddhist and Jainist movements. However, modern Bengali owes as much to Sanskrit. Like the society that thrived to populate the modern Bengal, Bengali language and culture appears to be a perfect amalgam of almost unanalysable elements.

List of Bengali poets

Inception at the Turn of the Millennium

Jayadeva and the Islamic Invasion

Epic in Vernacular

• Krittibas Ojha
• Kashiram Das

Bhakti Movement

Vaishnava Padabali

Islamic Literature

• Alaol

Europeans Start Business in Bengal

Shakta Padabali

English Rule : Cultural Shifts

• Urbanisation of the Folk : Tappa

Birth of Modern Poetry

• New Experiments in Bengali Poetry : Michael Madhusudan Dutt
• Rabindranath :

Kallol - Kavita - Parichay : Age of Little Magazines

Jibanananda Das
Premendra Mitra
Buddhadeva Bose
Sudhindranath Datta

Post World War II Poets

IPTA Movement

• Salil Choudhury

Language Movement

Age of Confusion

• Shankha Ghosh
• Alokeranjan Dasgupta

Krittibas Movement:

Sunil Gangopadhyay
Dipak Majumdar
Shakti Chattopadhyay
Utpal Kumar Basu
Benoy Majumdar

Hungry Generation

Sixties and Seventies : Youthful Dreams

Shamsur Rahman
Humayun Azad
Bhaskar Chakrabarty
Mridul Dasgupta
Tushar Roy
Tushar Choudhury
Ananya Roy
Ranajit Das
Joy Goswami

Eighties and Nineties : Frustrated Youth

Samyabrata joardar
Mandakranta Sen
Aveek Bandyopadhyay
Dipankar Bagchi
Taslima Nasrin
Sarbajit Sarkar
Sudip Basu