W B Yeats (1865 – 1939)

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.”

He was “beautiful to look at” and that “his speech has the perfect intonation and slow chant-like moderation of the dramatic saint.”

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.

“Perhaps it is as well that [Tagore] died now and did not see the many horrors that are likely to descend in increasing measure on the world and on India. He had seen enough and he was infinitely sad and unhappy.” Toward the end of his life, Tagore was indeed becoming discouraged about the state…

“In common with thousands of his countrymen I owe much to one who by his poetic genius and singular purity of life has raised India in the estimation of the world.” “I regard the Poet as sentinel warning us against the approach of enemies called Bigotry, Lethargy, Intolerance, Ignorance, Inertia and other members of that…

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”.