GREAT POETS

Sarojini Naidu (née Chattopadhyay) 13 February 1879 – 2 March 1949)was an Indian political activist and poet who served as the first Governor of United Provinces, after India's independence. She played an important role in the Indian independence movement against the British Raj. She was the first Indian woman to be president of the Indian National Congress and appointed governor of a state.

Born in a Bengali family in Hyderabad, Naidu was educated in Madras, London and Cambridge. Following her time in Britain, where she worked as a suffragist, she was drawn to the Congress party's struggle for India's independence. She became a part of the national movement and became a follower of Mahatma Gandhi and his idea of swaraj (self-rule). She was appointed Congress president in 1925 and, when India achieved its independence, became Governor of the United Provinces in 1947.

Naidu's literary work as a poet earned her the nickname the "Nightingale of India" by Gandhi because of the colour, imagery, and lyrical quality of her poetry. Her œuvre includes both children's poems and others written on more serious themes including patriotism and tragedy. Published in 1912, "In the Bazaars of Hyderabad" remains one of her most popular poems.

*Works* 

1905: The Golden Threshold, London: William Heineman

1915: The Bird of Time: Songs of Life, Death & the Spring, London: William Heineman and New York: John Lane Company

1917: The Broken Wing: Songs of Love, Death and Destiny

1919: "The Song of the Palanquin Bearers", lyrics by Naidu and music by Martin Shaw, London: Curwen

1920: The Speeches and Writings of Sarojini Naidu, Madras: G.A. Natesan & Co.

1922: Editor, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, An Ambassador of Unity: His Speeches & Writings 1912–1917, with a biographical "Pen Portrait" of Jinnah by Naidu, Madras: Ganesh & Co.

1928: The Sceptred Flute: Songs of India, New York: Dodd, Mead, & Co.[42][32]

1961: The Feather of the Dawn, edited by Padmaja Naidu, Bombay: Asia Publishing House

 *Death* 

The ashes of Naidu kept at Golden Threshold, Hyderabad before immersion

Naidu died of cardiac arrest at 3:30 p.m. (IST) on 2 March 1949 at the Government House in Lucknow. Upon her return from New Delhi on 15 February, she was advised to rest by her doctors, and all official engagements were canceled. Her health deteriorated substantially and bloodletting was performed on the night of 1 March after she complained of severe [headache]. She collapsed following a fit of cough. Naidu was said to have asked the nurse attending to her to sing to her at about 10:40 p.m. (IST) which put her to sleep.She subsequently died, and her last rites were performed at the Gomati River.

Legacy

Naidu is known as "one of India's feminist luminaries".[3] Naidu's birthday, 13 February, is celebrated as Women's Day to recognise powerful voices of women in India's history.

Composer Helen Searles Westbrook (1889–1967) set Naidu's text to music in her song "Invincible."

As a poet, Naidu was known as the "Nightingale of India". Edmund Gosse called her "the most accomplished living poet in India" in 1919.

Golden Threshold in 2015

Naidu is memorialized in the Golden Threshold, an off-campus annex of University of Hyderabad named for her first collection of poetry. Golden Threshold now houses the Sarojini Naidu School of Arts & Communication in the University of Hyderabad.

Asteroid 5647 Sarojininaidu, discovered by Eleanor Helin at Palomar Observatory in 1990, was named in her memory. The official naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on 27 August 2019 (M.P.C. 115893).

In 2014, Google India commemorated Naidu's 135th birth anniversary with a Google Doodle.

She passed away on this day in March 1949 (March 2, 1949)

Grateful thanks to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia.

GREAT POETS

He was born on this day in 1807. (FEBRUARY 27, 1807).

Grateful thanks to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia 

GREAT POETS

PERCY SHELLEY By Will Durant 

When Shelley heard that Keats had died, by tubercle bacilli and the Quarterly Review, he sank into a long seclusion, and poured his wrath and grief into the greatest of English elegies, Adonais. He must have felt, with his feminine sensitivity to every wind of fate, how closely bound was his own destiny with that of Keats-how soon he, too, would fall defeated in the eternal war of poetry and fact.

For Shelley, as Sir Henry Maine would have put it, had based his life and thought on the “State of Nature,” on Rousseau’s dream of a Golden Age in which all men had been, or would be, equal, and he was almost physiologically hostile to that “Historical Method” which balances ideals with realities, and aspirations with history. He could not read history; it seemed to him an abominable record of miseries and crimes; in every age that he studied he sought out not the actual conduct and vicissitudes of men, but their poetry and their religion, their ideal feelings and desires; he knew Aeschylus better than he knew Thucydides; and he forgot that in Aeschylus Prometheus was bound. What could be more certain than his suffering?

He was as sensitive as his “Sensitive Plant,” subject like it to quick decay while rougher fibers flourished and survived. He described himself through Julian as “Me, who am as a nerve o’er which do creep the else unfelt oppressions of this earth.” No one would have thought, seeing this delicate lad, never quite adult, that he had set all England fuming with his heresies. Trelawney, meeting him for the first time, wrote:“Was it possible this mild-looking, beardless boy could be the veritable monster at war with all the world?” McCready, the painter, said that he could not portray Shelley’s face, because it was “too beautiful,” and too elusively so; the man’s soul was elsewhere.

No one was ever more completely or exclusively a poet. He is to poets what Spenser was before Shelley came—the very embodiment of all that poetry means. “Poetry,” he wrote, in his famous “Defense,”—“poetry, and the principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are the God and the Mammon of the world…. But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon nor Milton had ever existed; if Raphael and Michelangelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place; if no monuments of ancient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of the religion of the ancient world had been extinguished together with its beliefs.”

On July 8, 1822, Shelley and his friend Williams left the Casa Magni in which they were staying on the island of Lerici, and sailed in Shelley’s boat, the Ariel, across the Bay of Spezzia to Leghorn, to meet the impoverished Leigh Hunt and his abounding family, whom Shelley had recklessly invited to Italy as his guests. The little sailboat accomplished the trip to Leghorn safely, but as they were all about to return, the skies announced a storm. Hunt decided to remain behind with his brood, and to come the next day, but Shelley insisted on returning to Lerici; Mary Shelley and Mrs.Williams had been left there alone, and would be worried if their men did not appear. As the two youths set out from the harbor the sailors on the ships they passed warned them to comeback. But they sailed on.

When they failed to reach Casa Magni that night Mary Shelley knew that fate had taken her poet from her. She broke out in wild despair, and engaged a vessel early the next morning to take her to Leghorn. There she found Hunt and Byron, but no Williams or Shelley. Byron went energetically to work and had the coast searched for mile after mile. It was not till after eight days that they found the body of Williams, lying bloated and almost unrecognizable on the sands; and not for another two days did they find Shelley—all that remained of him, the flesh torn away from his bones by vultures, the face gone beyond recognition; they knew him only from the Sophocles in one pocket and the Keats in another.

The law of Tuscany required that bodies thrown up by the sea must be burnt to avoid pestilence. So Byron and Hunt and Trelawney built a pyre, and when the body was half consumed, Trelawney snatched the heart out of the flames. The widow had the heart buried near Keats in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome, under a slab bearing the simple words, Cor cordium—“heart of hearts.” When she died, twenty-nine years later, it was found that her copy of Adonais contained (in a silken covering) the ashes of her dead lover, at that page which speaks of immortality, and the hope that springs forever in defeated men.

Grateful thanks to 

CLASSIC LITERATURES group,  Facebook