THE IDENTICAL POETIC MISSION AND VISION OF WHITMAN AND NAZRUL

Abstract

The paper aims at finding out some striking similarities regarding poetic mission and vision between Walt Whitman, the poet of the USA and Kazi Nazrul Islam, the great national poet of Bangladesh. Though Whitman and Nazrul were born to two different great nations and in quite different centuries, they have become the poets of the world, of all nations, and of all times because of their extraordinary love for common humanity and true sense of well-being for mankind. Though they were truly the representative poets of their own era and represented hopes and aspirations of the commons and the oppressed section of their own society, they were able to transcend their era and have become poets of common humanity of all times by virtue of their transcendental and universal humanistic poetic spirit. As, even today, the reality all over the world is the same and that always the commons are exploited; are the primary victims of any kind of political upheaval or social and economic corruption done by so called rulers, elite or vested section of the society; and their sufferings are overlooked or not really understood and addressed by the so called privileged or ruling class of a country, the poetry of Whitman and  Nazrul deserves a serious consideration because they just not only speak for the oppressed common people but also  unmask those exploiters, who are responsible for many social evils of the society. Though many writers throughout the ages wrote for the common, Nazrul and Whitman are yet different from them because of their universal voice, which transcends any local cultural milieu. The authors of this paper has taken some representative poems of both the poets into considerations to understand the true poetic mission and vision of these two great poets how they, in their respective historical context, understood the sufferings of the commons addressed them properly and thereby how the truth and ideas of their poetry enlighten us still today.