Ezra Pound and Rabindranath Tagore.

By Harold M. Hurwitz.

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EZRA POUND MET the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore and heard his poetry for the first time at a “Tagore Evening” which Wil­liam Rothenstein, painter, founder of the India Society, and Tagore’s London host, gave for his distinguished guest at his home in Hamp­stead Heath on the evening of July 7, 1912.1 At Rothenstein’s, W. B. Yeats read aloud several poems that Tagore had translated into English from his Bengali works shortly before he left India and while he was en route to London in the spring of 1912. Pound, like many of the other guests gathered at Rothenstein’s that evening,2 was deeply moved by the poetry. In an essay published several months later he compared his response to Tagore with Boccaccio’s excitement in discovering the Greeks and Dante:

 

Hearing his first Greek professor, hearing for the first time the curious music of Theocritus, coming for the first time upon that classic composure which Dante had a little suggested in his description of limbo, Boccaccio must have felt, I think, little differently from what we have felt here, we few who have been privileged to receive the work of Mr. Tagore before the public had heard it.3

 

After the Yeats reading, Pound became one of Tagore’s most fervent admirers. Rothenstein remarked in this connection that for several weeks following the program “the young poets came to sit at Tagore’s feet; Ezra Pound the most assiduously.”4

POUND’S ENTHUSIASM FOR Tagore was first revealed in a letter he sent Harriet Monroe, the editor of the new American magazine, Poetry. Acting as her foreign correspondent, he was anxious to get some of Tagore’s work before the other journals did. Writing Miss Monroe from London on September 24, 1912, he told her of his plans:

 

I’ve just written to Yeats. It’s rather hard to get anything out of him by mail and he won’t be back in London until November. Still I’ve done what I can, and as it’s the first favor or about the first that I’ve asked for three years, I may get something–”to set the tone.”

Also, I’ll try to get some of the poems of the very great Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore. They are going to be the sensation of the winter…W. B. Y. is doing the introduction to them.5 They are translated by the author into very beautiful English prose, with mastery of cadence….6

 

A few weeks later, Pound again wrote to Miss Monroe, extremely excited because he had some Tagore poems for the next number of Poetry and because he felt the Indian poet was going to create a tremendous stir in England and America:

 

This is The Scoop. Reserve space in the next number for Tagore…. He has sung Bengal into a nation, and his English version of his poems is very wonderful. Yeats is doing the introduction.

And we’re to hold down the American copyright. I’ve known for weeks that he was the event of the winter. Yeats greeted me with “someone greater than any of us – I read these things and wonder why one should go on trying to write.”

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It’s the only real fever of excitement among the inner circle of liter­ature that I’ve ever seen here. And we – Poetry – have got six poems at the least; and nobody else will have any….7

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Pound was successful in obtaining six of the poems for Poetry, and these were published in the issue of December 1912, along with an essay by him on Tagore. The six poems were from the Gitanjali, a volume of Tagore’s English translations published by the India Society in November 1912. Both Pound and Miss Monroe were further delighted by the fact that these were the first of Tagore’s poems to be published in the West, since the India Society’s edition was a private, subscribed one and was not distributed until early in 1913.

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IN THE OPENING line of his essay, Pound emphasized the impor­tance of the occasion, remarking that “The appearance of the poems of Rabindranath Tagore, translated by himself from Bengali into English, is an event in the history of English poetry and of world poetry.’8 In the rest of his brief appreciation, he described the outstanding qualities of the poetry and explained why he thought it so significant.

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As one might expect, Pound was fascinated with the verse form of the original Bengali, which he found to be fashioned “in metres perhaps the most finished and most subtle of any known to us.”9 He also felt that Tagore’s lines contained the harmonious complexity which characterized all great art. He described its form through a series of comparisons: “If you refine the art of the troubadours, combine it with that of the Pleiade, and add to that the sound unit principle of the most advanced artists in vers libre, you would get something like the system of Bengali verse.’10

Pound was not only delighted with the versification but also highly pleased with the contents, which he hoped might have a spiritually regenerating effect on English readers. In this connection, he remarked that “the Bengali brings to us the pledge of a calm which we need ever much in an age of steel and mechanics. It brings a quiet proclamation of the fellowship between man and the gods; between man and nature.’11

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In his conclusion, Pound stressed the moral value of the poems, especially his hope and belief that they would strengthen “world fellowship.” Knowing what we do about his later life, this early idealism seems strange, but it has the ring of sincerity to it. It is interesting to note, however, that in two later essays on Tagore, published in 1913, he omitted any reference to world fellowship and Tagore’s contribution to this noble cause.The American poet expressed his full appreciation of Tagore’s Gitanjali in a notice in the Fortnightly Review in March, 1913, shortly after the appearance of the Macmillan edition of this work.12 This essay is similar in many respects to the one he wrote for Poetry, but it is more detailed and even more extravagant, possibly because he was writing for a larger audience and because Tagore had achieved some prominence since the previous essay. For example, early in his remarks, Pound rated Tagore’s genius equal to Dante’s, an appraisal he probably later regretted: “To find fitting comparison for the content of volume [sic] before us,” he wrote, “I am com­pelled to one sole book of my acquaintance, the Paradiso of Dante.”13 Although Pound’s praise seems extravagant today, there are several logical reasons for his admiration of the Indian’s work in addition to those he discussed in print. In the first place, Tagore wrote in the colloquial, narrative style that Pound admired and used himself.  Number ninety-three, a poem about approaching death, is a good example of his idiom:

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I have got my leave. Bid me farewell my brothers!
I bow to you all and take my departure.
      Here I give back the keys of my door –
and I give up all claims to my house. I only ask
for last kind words from you.
      We were neighbors for long, but I received more
than I could give. Now the day has dawned and the
lamp that lit my dark corner is out. A summons has
come and I am ready for my journey

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Secondly, one may assume that Pound would be sympathetic to the devotional nature of Tagore’s work, for many of his early poems also had religious overtones. In his early “Greek Epigram,” for example, Pound pictured God as the creator of all beauty – a senti­ment common to Tagore’s verse:

 

Day and night are never weary
Nor yet is God of creating
For day and night their
torch-bearers
The aube and the crepuscle.14

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It is also likely that he admired the Indian’s independent spirit. Throughout his life, Tagore refused to submit to British tyranny or Indian chauvinism; and his broad and uncompromising nationalis­tic ideals were reflected in many of his poems.

 

BECAUSE HE ADMIRED Tagore’s poetry so greatly, the American poet was very unhappy about the kind of bogus reception that he was receiving personally in England. In an essay in the New Free­woman Pound took the English public to task for its failure to appreciate Tagore:

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Why the good people of this island are unable to honour a fine poet as such, why they are incapable of …devising for his honour any better device than that of wrapping his life in cotton wool and parading about with the effigy of a sanctimonious moralist, remains and will remain for me an insoluble mystery…Rabindranath Tagore is not to be confused…with any Theosophist propaganda; nor with any of the various mis­sionaries of the seven and seventy isms of the mystical East. He is an artist pure and simple, an author whose voice has almost as many shades as one might have expected from Voltaire and whose sense of humor is as delicate as that of any writer in Paris.15

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Pound’s enthusiasm for Tagore’s character possibly stems from the fact that for quite some time he had been anxious to meet a man who, like Tagore, would “stand for mankind.” He was tired of fearful, timid men. He wanted a man who was at once heroic and sensitive, one not afraid of dreaming great dreams, as he wrote in “Revolt”:

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Let us be men that dream,
Not cowards, dabblers, waiters
For dead Time to reawaken and grant balm
For ills unnamed.

Great God, if we be damn’d to be not men but only dreams,
Then let us be such dreams the world shall tremble at
And know we be its rulers though but dreams!16

 

At the same time that Pound was praising Tagore publicly he was also making some private reservations about his work. In a letter to Harriet Monroe, written in April, 1913, he raised some questions about Tagore’s poetry, fearing that it would become overly mystical and exotic unless pruned very carefully. “It will be very difficult for his defenders in London if he takes to printing anything except his best work,” he wrote her, probably concerning Mac­millan’s plans to issue more of Tagore’s translations. And in an abrupt change from the opinions he expressed in his earlier articles, Pound sharply criticized Tagore’s philosophy in this letter:

 

As a religious teacher, he is superfluous….And his [Tagore’s] philosophy hasn’t much in it for a man who has “felt the pangs” or been pestered with Western civilization….So long as he sticks to poetry he can be defended on stylistic grounds against those who disagree with his con­tent….In his original Bengali he has the novelty of rime and rhythm and of expression, but in a prose translation it is just “more theosophy.”17

 

POUND’S CRITICISM IS accurate but surprising because in his two previous articles on Tagore he had made little distinction between the original and the translations. It is also startling to note that he criticized the contents of the poems in this letter, for he previously had found them significant. Although the letter was written only a month after his very laudatory review in the Fortnightly Review, there are, however, several valid explanations for his changed views.

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In the first place, internal evidence indicates that much of Pound’s review was written several months before its publication. It is likely that after it was written, Pound re-read the Gitanjali and found it unsatisfactory. It is also likely that he saw some of the manuscripts of the translations that Tagore intended to publish after the Gitanjali and was disappointed in them. Rothenstein, Sturge Moore, and Yeats had copies of the manuscripts – the latter two because they were helping Tagore with his revisions – and Pound knew all three of them well. There is also a shade of personal animosity towards Tagore in the letter to Miss Monroe, and perhaps this might have been another reason for his criticism of the Indian’s work.