SOURCE: "The Muse's Bower: Sarojini's Poetic Achievement," in Sarojini Naidu and Her Poetry, Kitab Mahal, 1981, pp. 121-144.

In the following essay, Dwivedi presents an overview of Naidu's career.

Sarojini's poetic output has been meagre but qualitative. Her early verses were entirely English in form and content, but a timely advice of Sir Gosse turned her to her native land for themes and raw materials. Exquisitely did she sing about the beauty of the Indian landscape, about the common man and woman, about the Hindu-Muslim unity, and about the country's subjection under the Britishers. With a stroke of good luck, she came in touch with such distinguished literary personalities of the day as Edmund Gosse and Arthur Symons, who showed her, as she has confessed, the path to the Golden Threshold of Poetry, the path from which she never swerved. Later, she thrived on her own poetic merits, and...