Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was the youngest son of Debendranath Tagore, a leader of the Brahmo Samaj, which was a new religious sect in nineteenth-century Bengal and which attempted a revival of the ultimate monistic basis of Hinduism as laid down in the Upanishads. He was educated at home; and although at seventeen he was sent to England for formal schooling, he did not finish his studies there. In his mature years, in addition to his many-sided literary activities,
Jibanananda Das is the most heterodox, not to say eccentric, among the poets of the new school and he is no doubt the most original. Das was brought up in Barisal where he had his school and early college education, and he finished his University education in Calcutta. His first efforts in versification were along the traditional path and his early poems follow the pattern of Satyendranath Datta and Kazi Nazrul Islam. His early poems were published in different periodicals, were collected in a volume entitled Jhara Palak (A Cast-off Feather, 1928).
Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), known as the 'Rebel' poet in Bengali literature and the ‘Bulbul' or Nightingale of Bengali music, was one of the most colorful personalities of undivided Bengal between 1920 and 1930. His role in freeing modern Bengali poetry from poor and unsuccessful imitations of Rabindranath Tagore was significant.
Bankim Chandra Chatterjee was educated at the Hoogly College and belonged to an orthodox family. He did for Bengali fiction what Michael Madhusudan Dutt had done for Bengali poetry, that is, he brought in imagination. Chatterjee was more fortunate than Dutt as he did not have to set up his own diction from the very start. The prose style was already standardized; what Chatterjee did was to break its monotony, shear off it's ponderous verbosity and give it a twist of informality and intimacy. Chatterjee's own style grew up as he went on writing.