At the turn of the 20th century, few non-European writers captured the Western literary imagination as powerfully as Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore. For many, especially in Britain, he was a symbol of tranquility in the face of industrial exhaustion. Central to this mythmaking was William Butler Yeats – the towering 20th-century Irish poet and co-founder of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre – who became Tagore’s most celebrated Western champion.
In 1913, Tagore, became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The citation praised his “profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West.”
A meeting of minds, and misunderstandings
Tagore met Yeats in June 1912 at the house of English painter and cultural intermediary William Rothenstein. Yeats, presented with the English manuscript of Gitanjali, was immediately moved: “I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days,” he wrote in the introduction, “reading it in railway trains, or on the tops of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me.”
As literary scholar Dr Ragini Mohite writes in her 2025 article, ‘Yeats, Tagore, and the Nobel Prize in Literature: Imprimaturs in Modernist Cultural Conversations’ (International Yeats Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1, 2025), this introduction helped construct the image of Tagore as a saint-like figure, one who seemed to channel “the Indian civilization itself.”
For Yeats, Gitanjali was akin to scripture. He likened Tagore to the English poet William Blake, and imagined India not as an exotic Other, but as a mirror. As Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg professor Dr Carl O’Brien observes in his article ‘Rabindranath Tagore’s India and WB Yeats’s Ireland’ (Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 2019), Yeats imagined Indian culture “not because of its strangeness, but because it was like meeting our own image… our voice as in a dream.”
Yeats’s framing proved decisive. Mohite contends that the Nobel committee’s internal report relied “entirely on Yeats’s introduction,” even admitting that “no biographical information was included with the proposal.” In Yeats’s words, Tagore was “the first among our saints,” someone who rose above worldly strife.
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By the time Tagore won the Nobel in November 1913, accusations circulated that he had not written the translations alone. Some, like British journalist Valentine Chirol, cast aspersions on his English proficiency; others suggested Yeats was the true author. As Mohite observes, Tagore’s own disappointment with such insinuations was clear: “It is not possible for [Chirol] to relish the idea of Mohammedans sharing this honour with Hindus.”
While Yeats undoubtedly assisted in shaping the English Gitanjali—making editorial suggestions and contributing to its arrangement— he did so alongside others, sometimes with mixed feelings about his lack of sole control over the proofs. Nonetheless, Tagore remained the work’s author and translator, and the Nobel Prize, as Mohite suggests, became a lightning rod for praise and critique alike.
The Gitanjali for which Tagore was honoured was not his 1910 Bengali collection, but a curated English compilation — only 53 of the 103 poems were from the original; the rest were taken from other works such as Kheya and Achalayatan, stripped of rhyme and metre, and arranged for a mystical tone.
In 1913, Yeats helped stage Tagore’s play The Post Office at the Abbey Theatre. He also introduced Tagore to American poet Ezra Pound and secured publication through the India Society and Macmillan. This elevation of Tagore as a mystic suited the moment but troubled critics. Pound warned early: “If his entourage has presented him as a religious teacher rather than as an artist, it is much to be lamented.”
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Tagore himself grew wary of this spiritual branding. In his delayed Nobel lecture (1921), he focused on his newly founded Visva-Bharati University, saying: “I have used the money for establishing… a university where Western students might come and meet their Eastern brethren.” He had begun converting symbolic recognition into real capital for India’s educational sovereignty.
Divergent national poetics
Yeats would win his Nobel a decade later, in 1923, as the national poet of the newly independent Irish Free State. His Nobel lecture, “The Irish Dramatic Movement”, celebrated the role of literature in shaping Ireland’s national consciousness. As he wrote to Edmund Gosse, “Of course I know quite well that this honour is not given to me as an individual but as a representative of a literary movement and of a nation.”
Tagore, by contrast, was increasingly critical of nationalism. In his lectures (Nationalism, 1917), he argued that political chauvinism — whether Western or Eastern — ultimately imitated the violence of the Empire. His novel Gora (1909) goes further, challenging notions of religious and racial purity through a protagonist who discovers he is ethnically Irish but raised as a Brahmin Hindu.
Yeats’s nationalism, while not imperialist, was mythic. Rooted in Celtic revivalism, his plays and poetry built a romantic Irish self-image. While Tagore sought to dismantle cultural boundaries, Yeats idealised Ireland’s past to inspire its future. Both poets looked to tradition, but Tagore’s was dialogic and international; Yeats’s, symbolic and insular.
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A collaboration fractured
Their relationship soon grew strained. By 1935, Yeats wrote bitterly, “Damn Tagore … Tagore does not know English, no Indian knows English. We got out three good books … then he brought out sentimental rubbish and wrecked his reputation” (Yeats, Letters, p. 834). This position contrasts starkly with his tribute just four years earlier in The Golden Book of Tagore (1931), where Yeats wrote, “I am still your most loyal student and admirer.”
This disillusionment, scholars say, stemmed not just from aesthetic disagreement, but from ideological divergence. Tagore, unlike Yeats, rejected nationalism as the foundation of identity. As O’Brien contends, Tagore denounced the violent mimicry of European imperialism in his lectures, notably in “Nationalism” (1917) and “The Spirit of Japan” (1916). “By this device the people who love freedom perpetuate slavery in a large portion of the world,” he wrote, decrying both European hypocrisy and Asian complicity in adopting imperialist values.
Meeting of the East and West
The literary crossing between Yeats and Tagore was a moment of rare poetic diplomacy. But it was also a cautionary tale. Recognition, especially in colonial settings, often demands translation, linguistic and cultural. In becoming the “Indian saint”, Tagore’s political agency and artistic precision were partially erased. Yet, as Tagore reminded us, “We cannot borrow other people’s history. If we stifle our own, we are committing suicide.”
Over a century later, their relationship remains a study in mutual admiration, ideological divergence, and the politics of literary framing. Yeats and Tagore remain twinned in Nobel memory, not as perfect collaborators, but as witnesses to a moment when East and West briefly, and uneasily, shared a page.
Rabindranath Tagore’s bust at St Stephen Green Park, Dublin, Ireland. (Wikimedia)