From: "Vrin Parker " Mailing-List: list vediculture@yahoogroups.com Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2003 04:24:21 -0000 Subject: [world-vedic] 'William Wordsworth was a Hindu poet' 'William Wordsworth was a Hindu poet' UNI NEW DELHI: When William Wordsworth penned one of his most famous poems, 'Immortality Ode', it seems the English Romantic poet was under the spell of Hindu religion and its philosophy of rebirth. Afraid that the numerous passages of the poem would antagonise the Orthodox Christians in England, Wordsworth deleted them from the original text, according to a new book on Hindu philosophy and the English Romantic movement. Nevertheless, the poem has remained ''inveterately Hindu'', subscribing to the Hindu doctrine of the soul's various births and deaths, says Krishna Gopal Srivastava, the author of 'Bhagavad-Gita and the English Romantic Movement'. Wordsworth, says the professor of English Literature at the University of Allahabad, is not the only English poet whose works had been influenced by the Gita. His contemporary William Blake shared the same belief of a long chain of births and rebirths before the soul achieved salvation. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wordsworth's bosom friend, and the other Romantic poets - Robert Southey, Percy Shelley and John Keats - too were fascinated by Indian mysticism enshrined in the Gita, says Srivastava, whose rendering of Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale' is displayed in the reading room of the Oriental section of the Cambridge University Library. According to the author, the source of influence of the Hindu philosophy on the Romantic poets was a revolutionary English prose rendering of the Gita by Charles Wilkins, a clerk in the Bengal establishment of the East India Company. Wilkins translated the Gita into English in 1785 at the recommendation of Warren Hastings, the first Governor General of British India. The translation received an enthusiastic response in England and two prominent magazines - The British Critic and The Monthly Magazine - published favourable reviews on the Englishman's work. Srivastava bases proof of the influence on Wordsworth on lines 2-4 of stanza V of the poem. ''The soul that rises with us, our life's star/Hath had elsewhere its setting/And cometh from afar." Wilkins's translation of the 22nd verse of the Gita goes: ''As a man throweth away old garments and putteth on new, even so the soul, having quitted its old mortal frames, entereth into others which are new.'' ''It is clear that the 'Immortality Ode' - Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood - is a Hindu poem, through and through, saturated with Hindu philosophy and mythology,'' says Srivastava, who did extensive research in India and Britain for the book, published by Macmillan India. Blake, whose poem 'A Vision of the Last Judgement' was influenced by the Gita, was so impressed by Wilkins's translation that he made a drawing of the translator entitling it 'The Brahmin', says Srivastava, whose articles on Aristotle's doctrine of tragic catharsis has appeared in The British Journal of Aesthetics. The 22nd verse of the Gita, he says, became very popular with the Romantic poets. ''Southey cites it as in Wilkins's translation in a footnote in his 'Curse of Kehama', Coleridge uses it in his sonnet, 'On a Homeward Journey Upon Hearing of the Birth of a Son'. Not everyone is impressed. ''It is, of course, an interesting research,'' says Shalini Sikka, a specialist in Romantic poets and a lecturer at the Jesus and Mary College, New Delhi. ''But there is no clear reference on the influence. The probability of influence is there, but there is no indication of actual evidence that Wordsworth and others were indeed influenced by the Gita."says Christian scholar Shalini Sikka.(No vested interested there?!!India's media is probably the world's most anti-national of any country in the world.)