W B Yeats (1865 – 1939)

Nicholas Roerich attest to Tagore’s popularity in Russia: “Gitanjali came like a revelation. The poems were read at gatherings and at private ‘at homes’. Only true talent could create such a precious mutual understanding. Now everyone at once became imbued with love for Tagore. It was evident how most contradictory people, the most irreconcilable psychologists…

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…

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…

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”.

“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.”

“The appearance of the poems of Rabindranath Tagore, translated by himself from Bengali into English, is an event in the history of English poetry and of world poetry.” “The Bengali brings to us the pledge of a calm which we need ever much in an age of steel and mechanics. It brings a quiet proclamation…