More Songs of the Vaisnava Acaryas

This book gathers fifty-two songs from across the whole span of Vaishnava devotional poetry, with no chapter divisions to sort them and no single author behind them. Alongside Gaudiya poets already well represented elsewhere on this site — Bhaktivinoda Thakura, Narottama dasa Thakura, Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati, Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami, the author of the Chaitanya-caritamrta itself — it holds songs credited to devotional traditions well outside the Gaudiya line: Mirabai, the sixteenth-century Rajasthani princess-poet whose songs of longing for Krishna are sung across nearly every region and language of India; Vallabhacarya, founder of the Pushti Marg tradition centered on Krishna's childhood pastimes; Surdas, the blind poet-saint of Vallabhacarya's own line. Read together, the collection works less as a single songbook than as a survey of how differently the same devotion to Krishna has been expressed by poets who never belonged to one school or one century, brought here under a title broad enough to hold all of them.