“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…
“It is certain, however, that no poet in English since the death of Goethe in 1832 can rival Tagore in noble humanity.”
“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.”
“Nothing could exceed the simplicity and unpretentiousness of this visitor from an older world. He was content to take things as he found them, and did not expect one to discourse all day on philosophy… and he could on rarer occasions be prevailed upon to sing his songs to the veritable wild and beautiful Indian…
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.
I consider the three years I spent in Santiniketan as the most fruitful of my life …. Santiniketan opened my eyes for the first time to the splendours of Indian and Far Eastern art. Until then I was completely under the sway of Western art, music and literature. Santiniketan made me the combined product of…
He was “beautiful to look at” and that “his speech has the perfect intonation and slow chant-like moderation of the dramatic saint.”
“I can now imagine a powerful and gentle Christ, which I never could before.”
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.
“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…