Deterioration of Cultural Outlook in E.J. Pratt’s The Dying Eagle and HLV Derozio’s The Harp of India

Abstract

The term ‘Comparative Literature’ is an ever charming term, it is explained as ‘and everywhere there is a connection, everywhere there is an illustration: no single event, no single literature is adequately comprehended except in its relation to other events, to other literatures’.An eminent critic Mathew Arnold who made this prophetic statement, almost certainly for the first time in 1848, by means of using the term ‘Comparative Literature’, and envisioning the future of comparative literary studies the world over. The bilingual and multilingual contexts that significantlyexist in Canada and India seem to be strong fountainheads which help to provide an atmosphere of natural inquisitiveness and amicable inclination for undertaking formal and non-formal studies in comparative literary areas in both the countries. This paper brings out the deterioration and disintegration of cultural outlooks in E.J. Pratt’s The Dying Eagle and Derozio’s The Harp of India. These poems lucidly delineated how western influences amends and modifies the cultures, values, traditions, faiths of native or indigenous religious and moral values. Further these poems disclose the experience of declining culture in the contemporary society.