“Half-Read Wisdom”: Yeats’s Impressionistic Partial Reading of Tagore

Abstract

W. B. Yeats’s role in promoting Rabindranath Tagore in the West and his laudatory introduction to Tagore’s lyrical volume Gitanjali (1912) have attracted diverse responses from critics. Some have viewed it as a sincere effort by a fellow poet while others criticize him for Orientalizing the Bengali poet. Yeats himself was aware that he could only grasp half of the beauty and power of Tagore’s works given his inability to read Bengali and appreciate the cultural nuances embedded in the lyrics. This put him in the position of an awe-struck but baffled Westerner responding to the exotic charm of an alien Oriental culture. Nevertheless, his mystical orientation allowed him to have an empathic and intuitive understanding of Tagore’s soulful renditions. Due to such complexities, neither a political nor a mystical-spiritual approach does justice to Yeats’s framing of Tagore in the early 1910s and beyond. By combining both these approaches, this essay intends to look at them as enabling rather disabling factors. The two sections of the essay probe into the cultural-political and the mystical-esthetic dimensions of Yeats’s half or partial reading of Tagore’s works with a view to offering a holistic understanding of the matter.