W B Yeats (1865 – 1939)

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”.

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”

A message from Dr Lin Wo-Chiang, President, Tagore Society, Singapore which appeared in the Tagore Centenary Volume in 1961: “Gurudev, as he is known throughout the world, set out as a pilgrim in 1924, and again in 1927, visiting Malaya, Indonesia, Indo-China and the Far East. It was during one of these sojourns that I…

Rabindranath Tagore writes music for his words, and one understands at every moment that he is so abundant, so spontaneous, so daring in his passion, so full of surprise, because he is doing something which has never seemed strange, unnatural, or in need of defense.

In his article “The Indian Tolstoy”, Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Soviet people’s commissar (minister) of education, stated: “Tagore’s works are so full of colour, subtle spiritual experiences and truly noble ideas that they now constitute a treasure of human culture”.

His white hair flowed softly down both sides of his forehead; the tufts of hair under the temples also were long like two beards, and linking up with the hair on his cheeks, continued into his beard, so that he gave an impression, to the boy I was then, of some ancient Oriental wizard.