by Michael Collins
As perhaps the most famous of Tagore’s Western interlocutors, Yeats often features in commentaries on Tagore and the... more
As perhaps the most famous of Tagore’s Western interlocutors, Yeats often features in commentaries on Tagore and the West, most specifically regarding Tagore’s visit to Britain in 1912 and Yeats’ role as midwife to Tagore’s Western reputation. Yeats’ role in securing the Nobel Prize for Rabindranath has been exaggerated: actually, a member of the Nobel Committee read Tagore in Bengali and they awarded the prize on the basis of many more texts than Gitanjali alone. Even so, it is almost universally assumed that Tagore recognised in Yeats a common poetic genius, and that Yeats, in turn, recognised Tagore as a ‘great poet’. But this is quite misleading. Tagore saw Yeats as a junior and less-accomplished man. Yeats’ knowledge of Tagore was embarrassingly vague and he himself had suggested that honouring Tagore in those early years was a piece of ‘wise imperialism’.
Rather than genuine dialogue and mutual learning, Yeats was more interested in instrumentalising Tagore – and the East more generally – as part of a project of European cultural recovery. Tagore functioned not as an independent thinker or agent of historical change in his own right, but as something of an aesthetic object. And when that object of fascination developed a voice beyond the pretty emotions of Gitanjali; when Tagore sought to lecture, educate and sometimes denounce the West in English, or to deepen the West’s understanding of Indian philosophy, his audience of admirers soon changed their mind. ‘Damn Tagore’, Yeats wrote in 1935, ‘he thought it more important to see and know English than to be a great poet, he brought out sentimental rubbish and wrecked his reputation. Tagore does not know English, no Indian knows English’. The early green shoots of cross-cultural growth did not last even into the summer of 1913 when Pound decided that Tagore’s philosophy had little to offer anyone who had ‘felt the pangs’ and been ‘pestered with Western civilisation’. Yeats soon distanced himself from Tagore, and whilst his encounters with Indian philosophy and religious thought outlasted the Tagore moment, he found it difficult to move beyond the gauche problematic posed by Pound: ‘Why should India’, Yeats asked in the 1930s, ‘be always thinking of peace – shanti? Life is a conflict’.
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