‘A gift to us’: Amit Chaudhuri on the achievements of Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Gitanjali’ as art-songs

It feels right that the Folio Society edition of the Gitanjali, published 112 years after its first outing, should begin with the original introduction by WB Yeats. It’s as much part of the book as the poems are. It is a reminder of the possibilities that existed in 1912, possibilities that widened and enriched the trajectory of modern poetry and the reach of a new intercultural world only beginning to be discovered. In his introduction, Yeats is trying to express the fascination, wonder, and problem of encountering the Gitanjali for the first time: he wants to do the near-impossible – to place Tagore historically and not give in to romanticisation. Yeats is acutely aware, at every moment, that he himself belongs to a particular movement in history; he does his best, as he starts his introduction, not to consign Tagore to a place outside it.

The first questions he asks the “distinguished Bengali doctor” with whom he has a conversation about Tagore are related to how one might think of “world literature”. What can one safely take as givens? Tagore would have conceivably, at some point, asked himself the same questions – except, like James Baldwin or Jorge Luis Borges, he already knows...

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