Samar Sen

Samar Sen Poems

Samar Sen Biography

Samar Sen was a prominent Bengali speaking Indian poet and journalist in the post-Independence era. He was a graduate of the Scottish Church College, at the University of Calcutta. Early life and career He hailed from an illustrious family, many of whose scions have enriched the intellectual world of Bengal. His grandfather, Dinesh Chandra Sen, was a well-known writer and a doyen of the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad. His father, Arun Sen, an academician of repute, had remarked, "I am the son of an illustrious father and the father of an illustrious son!" Samar Sen, along with Subhash Mukhopadhyay, belonged to the second generation of modern Bengali poets, to whom the torch was passed from such stalwarts as Jibananda Das, Bishnu Dey, Sudhindranath Dutta and others. However, he gave up poetry fairly early and devoted the better part of his later life to Marxism and journalism. He was the editor of the leftist newspaper Frontier published from Kolkata, which was banned during the notorious period of Indian Emergency (1975 -1977) declared by the then prime minister Indira Gandhi. Poetry Samar Sen, like his other illustrious contemporaries, grew up under the gigantic impact of Rabindranath Tagore. Yet Samar Sen was perhaps the first to 'break' with the lyrical romanticism of Tagore and introduced "modern" (disenchantment, decadence, avant garde urban heterotopia) in Bengali verse. Influence of French and English modernism was originally translated into Bengali verse. A certain convergence of modernism and Marxism was evident in his poetic thought and style. His poetic life was somewhat over shadowed by his very original journalism as the editor of legendary Frontier in his later life. He was also chosen as the translator in the translator program for Soviet literature, he spent nearly five years in Moskow in the translators job, and in later part of his life became somewhat doubtful about bureaucratic "Communism" in general.)

The Best Poem Of Samar Sen

Urvashi

Will you flow into our middle-class blood
Like clouds racing across the horizon
Or will you flow into our dismal lives
Now that you are so tired, Urvashi?
Like the fertile women who flow into
Chittaranjan maternity home
With the hungry fatigue of unfulfilled nights
And many sighs
How many green mornings like bitter nights
How much longer

Samar Sen Comments