SOURCE: Das, Sisir Kumar. “Michael Madhusudan Datta and the Sonnet in Bengal.” Mahfil: A Quarterly of South Asian Literature 3, no. 4 (1967): 102-05.

In the following essay, Das considers Dutt's development of the sonnet form and its importance for Bengali lyric poetry.

In May of 1865 Michael Madhusudan Datta sent a sonnet on Dante to Victor Emmanuel, the king of Italy, as tribute to the memory of the great European poet. In a letter addressed to the king, who received it very gracefully, the Bengali poet described his poem as “la petite fleur orientale.” The king was delighted to know that “the noble harmony of the Italian genius found an echo on the shores of the Ganges.”

Michael is the greatest Bengali poet of the mid-nineteenth century. He not only introduced into Bengali a masculinity of expression, but he was the first Bengali poet, and consequently the first Indian, to respond...