Tagore And Yeats: A Cross-Cultural Literary Dialogue

Abstract

In 1912, W.B. Yeats read Rabindranath Tagore’s English prose translations of his Bengali devotional poems and declared himself profoundly moved. The introduction he wrote for Gitanjali helped secure Tagore the Nobel Prize in 1913 and established the terms in which Western readers would understand and misunderstand the Indian poet for decades to come. This paper reexamines the Tagore-Yeats encounter, arguing that it was shaped as much by mutual misrecognition as by genuine affinity. Drawing on biographies by Dutta and Robinson and by Foster, and engaging with the orientalism critique associated with Said, I trace the structural parallels between two poets who were simultaneously conducting projects of cultural nationalism in colonized nations, while also attending to the asymmetries of power and perception that ensured their dialogue would remain, in important respects, a conversation at cross-purposes. The paper does not debunk the encounter. It tries to understand it honestly, which is a more difficult and more interesting task.