![]() ![]() The prize, he said, would be ‘a piece of wise imperialism from the English point of view’. He knew that if Tagore were awarded the Nobel Prize it would soften anti-colonial sentiments in India. India, sieved through Tagore’s poetry, appeared to Yeats as everything that he had expected it to be: enamoured of the mystical, and supporting a tradition where poetry and religion were the same thing. By assuming the role of the eastern sage, Tagore outplayed at their own game the narrow-minded orientalists who viewed, like the colonisers, real places in the world as ephemeral locations in which to play out one’s fantasies. There was subversion in Tagore’s effective rewriting of his poems. Yeats’s gushing admiration in his introduction reads much like a novice’s initial amazement at his master’s spontaneous wisdom, which nonetheless is well honed because it is artfully planned. I have done thereby injustice to myself and the shrine of Muse which proudly claims flowers from its own climate and culture.’ ‘I ought never to have intruded into your realm of glory with my offerings hastily giving them a foreign shine and certain assumed gestures familiar to you. In a letter to Sturge Moore, written in 1935, Tagore repented, saying: He was also aware, however, of his western audience’s orientalist expectation from an Indian poet. Tagore was well aware of this important dissimilarity sometimes he admonished himself for his feeble grasp of English, and on other occasions he blamed the vagaries of translation. To renew its sight in a fresher gladness of awakening. It is thou who drawest the veil of night upon the tired eyes of the day Let me not force my flagging spirit into a poor preparation for thy worship. a tradition, where poetry and religion are the same thing.’ display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my live long. ‘I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me. What struck Yeats, like other western readers of Tagore, was the religious and devotional nature of the poetry, and its ability to read beyond national and class distinctions a human condition. Although, like a teenage love affair, Yeats’s fascination with Tagore was intense but short-lived, it is not only a commentary on cross-cultural encounters within the British colonial world but also exemplary of western conceptions of the Orient. The Tagore–Yeats relationship is iconic of Indo–Irish connections, and the Irish poet’s introductory remarks in Gitanjali are among the most-cited in academic treatises on the subject. ![]() Tagore’s flowing beard, matched by the sweeping robe he donned, did little to discourage his audience’s apprentice-like devotion. Newspapers reported on ‘an Indian mystic’ and spoke of a ‘poet and saint’. Readers, stimulated by Yeats’s stamp of approval, found in Tagore’s poetry sustenance to satiate their thirst for Eastern spiritual guidance. By the time he returned to Britain he had been transformed from a relative unknown in Europe to the latest epitome of all stereotypes oriental. Tagore, meanwhile, travelled to America to deliver a series of scintillating lectures at Harvard. Yeats was by then well established in the London cultural scene and, as his biographer notes, he ‘relentlessly pressed case in the circles where he wielded influence’. Published by the India Society in 1912, it would be reprinted more than a dozen times within a year. Yeats agreed to write an introduction to Tagore’s collection (103 short poems translated into English from the original Bengali by the author), which, despite its hyperbolic praise, fired the imagination of the western world. The Irish poet reportedly burst into a torrent of praise on reading the manuscript: ‘if someone were to say he could improve this piece of writing, that person did not understand literature’. Overwhelmed by the rhetorical simplicity and philosophical gravity of Tagore’s work, Rothenstein eagerly passed them on to Yeats. Tagore had initially shown his poems to the English painter William Rothenstein. None would prove as beneficial as his meeting with W.B. On his third visit to Britain, in 1912, Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore met with a variety of literary figures, such as Ezra Pound and Thomas Sturge Moore. Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore in 1921-with his flowing beard and sweeping robe he seemed the epitome of all stereotypes oriental. ![]()
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