Spiritual & Literary Perspectives in the Poetry of Kabir Das and Swami Vivekanand: A Critical Exploration

Abstract

Kabir Das and Swami Vivekananda were two mammoth Indian mystic saints and poets. Their fundamental works cannot be quantified. The paper involves critical and comparative analysis of spiritual and literary aspects of poems by Kabir Das and Swami Vivekananda-two champions whose poems cut across tradition and time, across orthodoxy. The 15th-century mystic poet Kabir expressed a radical spiritual intuition nourished by Nirguna Bhakti, denouncing ritualism and caste stratification in vernacular poetry full of metaphor, paradox and experience-based observation. The philosopher-poet of the 19th century and Vedantic leader of the resurgence, Swami Vivekananda, saturated his poetry with self-realization, with national rebirth, with universalism, and with the blending of ancient Sanskritic rhythm with modern realization. The paper will include a comparison of how these two poets employ the literary elements of symbolism, meter, aphorism and rhetorical passion in their presentation of ultimate religious realities. The form, also, in the paper, in the invocation of the interior repose, of the experience of the transcendent, of renunciation of dogma, of how they are presented in the situation, in the language of a lyric, is opposed. The surface meaning of the lines of both the model, as the poets, Kabir and Vivekananda, see poetry not as the revelation of the lyric, not as the statement of the spiritual revolution, but as the commentary on the society. Finally, this parallel serves also to make their poetic traditions applicable in the more current thinking on belief, self-consciousness and freedom of the latter-day-modernism-connecting mysticism of the Middle Ages to the humanism of the modern era.