W B Yeats (1865 – 1939)

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1913 is awarded to Rabindranath Tagore “because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West”

“Here was poetry of a new order which seemed to me on a level with that of the great mystics. Andrew Bradley, to whom I showed them agreed: ‘It looks as though we have at last a great poet among us again.”

Victoria read Gitanjali in 1914 and said ‘it fell like celestial dew on my anguishing twenty four year old heart’. She described Tagore’s poetry as ‘magical mysticism’. She felt powerful echoes in Tagore´s personal loving God, radiating happiness and serenity, unlike the demanding and vengeful God imposed on her in childhood.

Dr Tomi Koura, Japan’s first psychologist, to commemorate the spatial memory of her first meeting with Rabindranath, a bronze bust commemorating the poet’s 120th birth anniversary was erected: a Memorial statue in 1981 at the foothills of the Asama Mountains on the outskirts of the town of Karuizawa in Nagano Prefecture. At that time she…

“that mighty flow of poetry which takes its strength from Hinduism as from the Ganges, and is called Rabindranath Tagore.”

C.H. Woolfe, Acting Colonial Secretary, introducing Tagore at Singapore’s Victoria Theatre on 25th July, 1927: “You have before you one of the world’s greatest men.”