Romantic Associations of Being and Unity: A Comparative Aesthetic Analysis of Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali

Abstract

Rabindranath Tagore’s (1861-1941) aesthetics involves a complexity for they apparently belong to none of the prominent ages of English poetry and yet curiously manifest various characteristics from most of these. This research aims to affirm that the predominant aesthetic ideal in Tagore’s poetry seems to echo the Romantic age (1800-1850) in English poetry. This research is an important study in asserting that Tagore, though a poet living in the Victorian age of English Poetry, seems to prefer to assimilate the ideals of William Wordsworth (1770- 1850) and John Keats (1795-1821) in his poetic aesthetics. This qualitative study examines Tagore’s aesthetics in Gitanjali to seek the unique trajectory of his aesthetics in the context of the English poetry of his time till the modern age. This paper uses Martin Heidegger’s concept of Da-sein to elucidate the romantic relationship found between the persona’s self and his Being in the selected poems from Gitanjali.