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Rabindranath Tagore was the greatest figure of the Indian Renaissance, a many-sided genius who seemed so much a part of Time. Yet, he could not be a Roman like Virgil, an Italian like Dante, or an American like Whitman; he could only be an Indian. He inherited great gifts of nature from a family de h in tradition and talent, the unageing spirit of the Upanishads, and a clear and warm comprehension of a God immanent and transcendent. To this he added a life richly lived. By that Sadhana which be stressed throughout in his writings, he attained a synthesis so complete that no body now remembers the sorrows of his early life, full of passion and tumult. Always he seemed a spirit secure from turmoil, armed with prophetic vision and the seer’s penetrating power. With that serenity he combined a vitality that brought about a revolution in life and literature, an amazing versatility, control of literary forms which he used like potter’s clay, and an endless profusion of imagery.

Tagore’s life falls into two parts. There was the early period when he ruled Bengali like a prince of letters, imparting to it fresh Victorian ferment the touch of genius, pouring passion into its poetry and stories and plays, and mixing naturalism and symbolism with the mellowness of India’s past. There was then the more spacious later period when, with the help of kindred Celtic spirits like Yeats and others, he was accepted by the world for his translations of his work into limpid, translucent English. He was not a mere poet; to him art and life were one. He was not a prophet who looked ; from the gods of the past, he made a new Religion of Man. When the spirit urged him, he denounced the wrongs inflicted on his country in the rhetoric of Revelation, he renounced knighthood with iridescent indignation and he repudiated friends like Eleanor Rathbone with Jeremiah like anger. His ideal of the world was a blend of true nationalism and true internationalism, and he built it in Visvabharati to­ preside over an era of universal culture. He was a great traveller, physically and intellectually, and to him, in feeling and realization, the world was one. There are few parallels to the fullness of his personality and to the width of his vision.

Tagore is among the greatest of the great poets of all time. This can be fully realized only by those whose mother-tongue is Bengali. But the Nobel Prize was given to him also for the way he rendered his Bengali poems into English. He maintained his rare understanding of English rhythm and cadence to the end, though it cannot equal his use of his own language, in the infinite patterns of his thought, the subtlety of his refrains, the undertones of his music and the lilt and gaiety of his lyrics, which at their best, even in translation, recall the songs of Solomon or the Psalms of David. The world will never forget the lasting image of him as a poet, living an idyllic life in the woodland quiet of Santiniketan, a wonderland of which we have many vignettes, the poet constructing rhythms, the poet watching a play, the poet measuring the notes of music, the poet among children to whom he gave his love, the poet receiving poets and scholars from other continents, the poet greeting Gandhi, greatness bounding towards greatness. Many will remember him too as a daring innovator in another world, as a courageous artist who, in his old age, discovered new patterns of line and colour and proclaimed his quaintly authentic pictures portraying a Blake-like world of light and shadows, and also the man of the world who liked common men and sang the songs of boatmen and fishermen. Such transforming power could be claimed by a poet only when the poet is ‘Vates�, in the old sense, the prophet, the seer.

Tagore’s life was not confined to poetry or painting. He had many ideas about many things. His contribution to religious and educational thought, economic reconstruction, politics and social reform was considerable. He was the bard of the Swadeshi movement and he was the first to see that the country’s diversity of languages, religions, and cultures could be the foundation of a rich cultural life. It is possible to over-stress this contribution, but his ideas on education, with which he experimented ceaselessly, will live. Education to him meant education front the child’s point of view, rooted in tradition and in close communion with nature. These ideas are complementary to his ideas of the unity of man and the oneness of the world. The anthem which he wrote for the nation sings first of co-operation among all men. In whatever he wrote and said, he showed the widest sympathy. He was thus a part of the life force of the world, always a daring discoverer and pioneer, in spite of his austere dignity. He was a classicist acceptable to the romantic school, for he was timeless in his qualities, his worship of beauty, his love of children and simplicity, and his consciousness of a creative, humorous and artistic god. He may not have been as good a novelist as Sarat Chandra; others may have been closer to the people and plunged deeper into the depths of life. Nevertheless, he will stand out, something more than a mere synthesis, as did Goethe, an embodiment of his age and a poet for all time, with his life as his great work, and always universal in appeal, the complete poet, the complete artist, and the complete man.

–F°ù´Ç³¾ All in All