As a young man university student at Columbia University. New York, I met, years ago, Rabindranath Tagore. I had read some of his poems in English and had found in them something different-a difference that I could not exactly define-from orthodox European poetry. True, they were written in perfect, perhaps Oxonian, English, but not characteristically English in their manner of being poetry.

What was my reaction, as a Latin American, as a Brazilian, as a son of the Tropics, to that, for me, somewhat new poetry coming from a tropical, non-European country? I mean by immediate reaction: that of an adolescent or very young man.

I felt that Tagore´s way of being a lyric was not exactly exotic for me. It was not English just as was not French or Spanish or Portuguese: the literary languages, then, of my most intimate acquaintence as a lover of poetry.

I read Tagore´s English as if it were a language only technically European: essentially it sounded to my ears so non-European that as a Brazilian, I could feel in it suggestions of a new lyrical flavour. Even, a new rhythm and a new music seemed to me to de-Anglicize some of the East Indian poet´s words and make them particularly suggestive of and-exotic world of poetry to my half non-European Brazilian ears and mind.

This would give a special interest to my personal acquaintance with Rabindranath Tagore. It was, I repeat, in new York: a most no-Tagorean setting.

We had East Indian tea: the poet and a member of other Columbia students. Then he lectured to us. I felt that he lectured to me. I felt that he lectured to me in a way that differed from what he said to Anglo-Saxon youth.

Some of what I had found in his poems, reading them, myself, I now found in his Oriental person, in his gestures, in his voice, in his smile. Certainly he was, as a person, as exotic to me as to Anglo-Saxons. He dressed as an Oriental. His voice was, neither that of an Anglo-American or of a European. It sounded somewhat timid and even a little feminine compared to the affirmative voices of Anglo-American poets like Vachel Lindsay, whom I had just heard singing - for he sang his poems - his own "General Booth Enters into Heaven". Timid even in comparison with the Irish - or non-lrish? It was so suavel-voice of William Butler Yeats.

Still it sounded to my ears with a sound that was not entirely exotic in its way of giving vowels in English a value not usually given to them by Anglo-Saxons. And suddenly I felt: there is something in the way of this East Indian speaking, as there is something in his written lyrical poetry, that makes a part of his person, and a part of his poetry, strangely familiar to me: to a Latin American. To a Brazilian. To a son of the tropics.

What did Rabindranath Tagore say to me, when, after his lecture, I told him how I had enjoyed it. He wanted to know where I was from. He probably felt that there was in me something of an East Indian youth. My olive complexion. My eyes. I told him that I was from Brazil and felt that the name "Brazil" meant little to him. He repeated: Brazil. And smiled and observed that I looked like an Eastern India. My impression of him was that there was something Brazilian in his appearence just as I had detected in his lyrical poetry, when I had first read it. Something that was, not exactly Brazilian, but that reminded one of Brazilian lyrical tendencies.

Since then-this was years ago-I have thought of the poetry of Tagore as a fascinating subject for an analysis, from the point of view of Brazilian lyricism. Has a common experience of tropical nature, tropical light, tropical colours, something to do with a common tendency, of East Indians and of Brazilians, to a lyrical expression in poetry and even in culture, as a national characteristic, that is marked by a suavity that is, nevertheless, some of it, intense or poignant?

Poets, more than most of novelists and of essaysts, seem to reflect the character or the ethos of a nation, as a British critic once pointed out. And he might have added: essaysts like Unamuno and novelists like Thomas Mann or James Joyce. Sike poets, some of them are always-or almost always-talking about themselves and consequently about their fellowmen, while other writers would generally be so busy demolishing or building things that, dealing with action, sometimes anonymous and unpersonal action, they would find little time to tell others of themselves and of those of their fellow-countrymen who are like themselves. Of course there are novelists just as there are essaysts who are so autobiographical as to be like lyrical poets in their tendency to tell their readers about themselves and about their fellow-countrymen. Lamb was of this type of essayst and Malraux is of this type of novelist.

Tagore, as a lyrical poet, tells us as much of other Indians as of himself. He is never unpersonal but always personal and autobiographical.

By being so, he is similar to Iberian-Spanish and Portuguese- not only poets, but novelists and essaysts, the most typical or characteristic of whom always have a tendency to write, directly or in disguised or inderect way, about themselves or about what they feel of this or of that. Was this characteristic autobiographical, or quase-autobiographical, that I detected in Tagore´s poems, when I first read them, reaching the conclusion that he was for me, in his way of being a lyrical poet, paradoxically at once exotic and familiar?

If, as James Stephens claims, in a subtle and penetrating short essay about V.V. Rozanov, "the thing that is finally valuable in an author is his intimate personal utterance", then there is un Rabindranath Tagore much that entitles him to survive by this kind of personal utterence in his poems. More: this kind of personal utterance in his poems makes these poems a revelation, to foreigners, not only of him, as a creative person, but of his fellow-countrymen, for what in him was the projection of these other East Indians.

East Indians may have novelists, essaysts, poets of a higher literary or artistic quality than Rabindranath Tagore. Authors of masterpieces such as he never wrote so great or so perfect. But, even if not reaching perfection of form or composition, he attaing ed "personal utterance" of a revealin-power-revealing of him and of East Indians. He probably will survive in this capacity: that of a poet or a writer who interpreted his own person and the lyrical ethos of his own people.

The world would be happier if there was more Tagores with this revealing and interpretative capacity though their lyrical writings. Lyricism is not literarily inferior except for pedantic critics. By being predominantly and directly lyrical, a writer may be also, an epic, in some of his writings, thus combining the two types of expression: an ideal combination, perhaps.

Of what Western poet, Tagore reminded me in a most striking way? Of William Butler Yeats, whom I had met also, as a university student: and who, as Tagore, did not desguise his ignorance of Brazil. Both, however, appeared to me - a Brazilian adolescent attending foreign universities - as poets who were different from European and Anglo-American poets, then of my knowledge; and who strangely seemed to me to have something remotely Iberian-particularly Portuguese - in their lyricism. What was it? Perhaps that sort of "sorrowful ecstasy" that some critics have found in Yeats; and that is not entirely absent from Tagore´s lyrical poetry, though he seems to be careful not to give his readers the impression of looking pessimistically at the world. And the fact is that neither the East Indian or the Irish poet are pessimists. They indulge in a kind of sorrow that is far from being that of conventional or radical pessimists. Rather it is that suave, almost paradoxically joyful sorrow, that is characteristic of Portuguese lyrical poetry-a poetry not very wellknown outside of Iberia; but that was discovered by Elizabeth Barret Browning who, impressed by it, gave to her famous collection of original and somewhat in-English sonnets the title of Sonnets from the Portuguese.

When Robert Lynd writes of Yeats´ poems in The Wind Among the Reeds that some of them are "a new thing in literature, a 'rapturous music' not heard before", one feels inclined to ask: what about Camoes 'sonnets' For Camoes, the Portuguese poet of the sixteenth century, seems to have anticipated both Yeats and Tagore in a type of extremely personal, autobiographical lyrical poetry, expressed in "rapturous music".

Each of the three is a poet or a writer of the personalistc Kind of poets or writers who, in their writings, reveal themselves and interpret their fellow-countrymen in both an autobiographical and a national way. No other East Indian has revealed, India, through literature, to the world, in so personalistic way as has Tagore, through a non-Indian may consider Sarojini Naidu, for instance, a more deliberate - in the Flaubertian way-literary artist than he. But not as revealing. Not as communicatively human in his manner of being himself and of revealing himself; of being East Indian and revealing Indian to Westerners.

When Yeats wrote Reveries over Childhood and Youth, he made clear a fact that was characteristic of his personalism: that it was a lyrical personalism. It is significant that he writes in his autobiography: "I remember little of childhood but its pain". It was after childhood, as an adolescent and as a youth, that he began "to grow happier with every year of life, gradually conguering something in myself". Was Tagore´s experience in this respect, similar to that of Yeats? It seems that both grew in close contact - a contact to them pleasant - with nature: Tagore with a tropical nature. Yeats used to look for butterflies, moths and bettles in parks: he would have enjoyed at least a summer vocation in some tropical country. He told me himself, when as a university student I had the opportunity of talking for a few minutes with him, that, knowing that Iberians - Portuguese and Spanish - had in them something acquired from Celts, he was interested to know how some Celtic myths about trees, about forests, about waters, had adapted themselves - if such an adaptation had perchance happened - to the tropical nature of Brazil, giving to this nature touches of Celtic beliefs in the association of beliefs in the supernatural to a nature, like the Brazilian nature, so different from that of Europe.

Both Tagore and Yeats must have been interesting to themselves both as persons and as poets; if they were not, they would not have been so lyrically, so poetically, so literarily autobiographical as they were. And had they been less lyrical as poets and less autobiographical as men, not only literature would be poorer but both India and Ireland would be less known to East Indians and to the Irish and less known to outsiders.

Excepetionally talented East Indians have become famous since Tagore. More famous than he. More influential as leaders of their people or of their nation.

But it doubtful if any has been more revealing of India, to the Indias and to outsiders, that Tagore through his personal and even autobiographical lyrical poetry or literature. Even as a lecturer, he was revealing of his India. India was laways present in what he said to foreign or Western students, immediately impressed by his characteristically way of dressing or by his to them exotically Indian aspect. He seems to have been deliberate in this: in being at once characteristically. East Indian and universal, though perhaps not exactly cosmopolitan. It is difficult to imagine him in a frock coat and wearing a white or a black tie, in the conventional bourgeois Western way. The India that he revealed, both through his literature and through his person, was an India that added to an elegant assimilation of European values an almost mystical preservation of its ancestral characteristics. He carried these characterists with him besides expressing them in his lyrical poetry.

I am not acquainte with what were Tagore´s exact engagements in East India of his days. With his political or quasi-political action. How far, in this respect, went his cultural East Indianism? When I met him he did not give me the impression of being a political activist.

I know that soon after I met William Butler Yeats, the great Irish poet and writer engaged actively in internal politics. To my surprise, he became President of the Irish Senate. I could hardly believe it. It was difficult to me to visualize Yeats as prosaic, conventional, solemn president of a bourgeois Senate. I doubt that his conventionally political activity as a Senator was ever as influential, as an expression of his nationalismo-so creative, so dynamic as a cultural force-as his literary activity as a lyricist. Probably the same might be said of Tagore´s Indianism. Or of the specifically political implications of his East Indanism.

This being exact, one is inclined to not accept passively Charles Maurras´s concept: "Politique d´abroad". In some cases, yes. In other cases, no.

Nationalism of the most creative type may be better developed through lyrical expression of its values-even when this expression is indirect - than through direct political action. It is a paradox but there are para doxes that are philosophically, if not valid, suggestive.

As a foreigner sees it-the foreigner being, in this case, a remote Latin American or an exotic (from an East Indian point of view) European or Anglo-American - Rabindranath Tagore was greatly influential- through his lyrical, personal, sometimes intimately autobiographical litarature - in revealing East India, if not so much to his fellow - countrymen, to outsiders, as a distinctive type of culture and a singular, but every humane expression of humanity.

Fonte: FREYRE, Gilberto. Tagore: a brazilian view of his lyrical poetry. Mosaic. New Delhi, n. 15, p. 7-11, nov./dec. 1976.