Iqbal And The English Romantics

In undertaking to examine Iqbal’s relationship to the English Romantic poets, Mr Ghulam Rasool Malik addresses himself to a major problem in Iqbal studies, a problem from which most Iqbal scholars tend to shy away for understandable reasons. To do justice to the task one needs to be a master of two very different literary, cultural and philosophic traditions. Mr Malik meets this difficult challenge with adequacy and competence. He shows a wide acquaintance with the writings of the English Romantics, in itself a formidable undertaking, involving six major writers: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats. He is also at home with the Urdu literary tradition and its Persian roots, the work of Mohammad Iqbal, and the tradition of Islamic thought. The result is a substantial study which documents very fully a major Indian poet’s relationship to Western literature. But Malik, in examining this relationship, does not overlook the points of difference between Iqbal and the English Romantics. The picture of Iqbal that emerges from the study is that of a poet who was willing to learn from the West as an equal, not an inferior.
(Vinod Sena)
The thesis is a work of solid, intelligent and original scholarship in an area of comparative literature and thought, which is of immense significance and value to the literary scholar in India as well as in the West. In its effort to correlate the complex strands of literature and related philosophical and aesthetic thinking of the English poets of the Romantic period with several corresponding themes, attitudes and techniques of the work of Iqbal it undoubtedly breaks new ground.
(G.K. Das)