W B Yeats (1865 – 1939)

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…

“No wonder that Mr. Tagore appeals so strongly to the common heart of his people and that his songs are sung and understood in the villages of his province as well as in the churches of the Brahma Samaj.” “I should not have said that these song-offerings are ”one side” of him. They are, rather,…

Academic Sergei Oldenburg wrote: “When we meet the great Indian poet here, we will be meeting a person who, in Bengali words, has said what we all understand and feel”.

“I can now imagine a powerful and gentle Christ, which I never could before.”

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.”

In the words of Haraid Hjäme, the Chairman of the Nobel Committee in 1913: “Quite independently of any knowledge of his Bengali poetry, irrespective, too, of differences of religious faiths, literary schools, or party aims, Tagore has been hailed from various quarters as a new and admirable master of that poetic art which has been…