Anna Akhmatova (1889 – 1966)

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”

“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.”

“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,…

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.

“It is certain, however, that no poet in English since the death of Goethe in 1832 can rival Tagore in noble humanity.”