Fakrul Alam Rabindranath, Jibanananda and the anxiety of influence I If ever there was to be a case made for the kind of “anxiety of influence” Harold Bloom has perceived in English romanticism in Bengali poetry, surely it is to be made by examining the relationship that exists between Rabindranath Tagore’s verse and the poetic career of Jibanananda Das. Bloom makes the case in his The Anxiety of Influence for viewing poetic history as distinguished by “strong poets” who make “that history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves” (Bloom, 5). He sees literary history as a site of struggle where the successor poet must perforce wrestle with his domineering precursor so that he can win the oedipal battle by disposing of the only begetter and thereby come into his own. It will be my endeavor in my paper to read an important episode in twentieth century Bengali poetic history as marked by just such a struggle between the two strongest Bengali poets where Jibanananda decides very early in his poetic career that the only way he could become a master poet was to break free of his ancestor, wary of the “anxiety of indebtedness” to the greatest poet Bengal had ever known, whose influence he knew he could not or would entirely overcome, but with whom he would have to grapple to break free. What I will do subsequently then is show the dialectical relationship of the two greatest poets of Bengal and look at the writings of Jibanananda in the context of his developing awareness of his own powers, and his need to get away from the anxiety of influence that began to obsess him as soon as
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