Bengal's greatest poet the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore wrote about the Bauls: "One day I chanced to hear a song from a beggar belonging to the Baul sect of Bengal... This simple song was a religious expression that was neither grossly concrete, full of crude details, nor metaphysical in its rarefied transcendentalism. At the same time it was alive with an emotional sincerity, it spoke of an intense yearning of the heart for the divine, which is in man and not in the temple or scriptures, in images or symbols... this gives an understanding that through their songs is their only form of worship."
Who can't trace the influence of Baul songs in Tagore's Rabindra Sangeet?
In fact, the mystical nature of Tagore's lyrics is also a product of his natural attraction to these wandering bards. Edward Dimock Jr. in his The Place of the Hidden Moon (1966) writes: "Rabindranath Tagore put the Bauls on a higher-than-respectable level by his praise of the beauty of their songs and spirit, and by his frank and proud acknowledgement of his own poetic debt to them." The Baul pattern also inspired many other successful poets, playwrights and songwriters of the 19th and 20th centuries.
