The second tendency in hindsight may be considered as a prominent strand of modernity inВ Bangla poetry. Here Kshitindranath boldlyВ typecasts English and American poets tracing their aesthetic propensities to cultural constitution:В вЂњEnglish poetry is forward-looking within a tradition: American poetry is forward-looking in searchВ of a tradition.вЂќ Kshitindranath further finds Whitman to be unique and path-breaking on two counts.В First, his affirmation that вЂњthe female equally with the male I sing,вЂќ which Kshitindranath takes toВ signify a celebration of gender equality (if not androgyny) second, WhitmanвЂ™s shift of poetic focusВ from the traditional realm of the amatory to the quotidian occupations and unglamorous sentiments ofВ people. The essay was composed in 1891,В scarcely six months before WhitmanвЂ™s death, and published in 1910. The first Indian to write on Whitman wasВ Kshitindranath Tagore, nephew to the more famous Rabindranath. Nevertheless, responses toВ Whitman in Bengal came from the most elitist of quarters. Whitman was probably too much of a novelty for the BengaliВ audience who were steeped in the languid romanticism of the Victorians. However, the AmericanВ poet to be most popular in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bengal was not Whitman butВ Longfellow, whose вЂњPsalm of LifeвЂќ was rendered into Bangla by Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay as Jeeban Sangeet (1869) in his lifetime. Besides, in Bangla discussions on the poet the American-ness of Whitman and hisВ iconoclasm form an enduring interest.Дuring his American travels in 1915, the social scientist Binoy Kumar Sarkar hailed WhitmanВ as Markinatmar Vani-murti or the verbal embodiment of the American soul. Bangla responses to Whitman evince far moreВ fascination with his earthiness and materialism, and are focused on the technicality and politics of hisВ poetry qua poetry. However, the reception of Whitman in BengalВ has hardly been bothered about his spiritual career. Mercor, and Guy Wilson AllenВ who suspect WhitmanвЂ™s acquaintance with Indian spiritual monism nevertheless choose to hail himВ as an inherently and unwittingly pro-Vedantic soul. The tendency of casting Whitman as a quasi-Indian magusВ would be energized by EmersonвЂ™s quip that Leaves of Grass was a вЂњmixture of the BhagavadgitaВ and the New York Herald,вЂќ and Swami VivekandaвЂ™s dubbing of Whitman as вЂњthe sannyasin ofВ America.вЂќ Western commentators like Romain Rolland, Dorothy F. The reception of Whitman in India mirrors that of Tagore in the West, inasmuch as both have beenВ victims of orientalist simplifications.