Dattatreya Ramachandra Bendre or Da Ra Bendre (1896-1981) was the foremost lyric poet of 20th-century Kannada literature. Among his many remarkable achievements was his unprecedented sublimation of everyday speech into high lyric poetry. Breathtaking in its range and preternaturally rich in euphony, Bendre’s poetic corpus would end up becoming both the exploration of an entire culture and the most comprehensive exploration of the Kannada language’s sound.