Whitman — Tagore — Roerich: On a Certain Poetic Triangle

A chapter of Rabindranath Tagore’s novel The Last Poem (1929) depicts a meeting of a literary circle in Calcutta, where young Bengali writers and intellectuals discuss Tagore’s poetry in a highly snobbish manner. This scene is somewhat out of place in the overall narrative and is largely motivated by the fact that the novel’s protagonist, Amit Ray, is also a poet who, though hesitant to publish his poems, is convinced, at least in the first half of the novel, of their superiority to Tagore’s old-fashioned poetry. At a meeting of the circle, Amit reads his own poem, written in a manner more reminiscent of Walt Whitman than Tagore. Tagore is known to have traveled to the United States several times, including to raise funds for his university at Shantiniketan, and at least the last trip was not particularly successful. At the same time, the trip to the North and South America marked Tagore’s fascination with modernist painting, which was reflected much more in his artistic than in his literary work, although even earlier, in London, he had met one of the leaders of American literary modernism, Ezra Pound, for whom Whitman always remained one of his most important (if not favorite) interlocutors. This article will discuss how Tagore and Whitman together became, in a sense, the pretext for Nicholay Roerich’s Flowers of Moria, a collection of poems that turned out to be a largely isolated attempt to develop a poetics reminiscent of both the Russian translation of Gitanjali and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The three poets whose names appear in the title of this article will be examined in the context of their affiliation to the international modernist movement and their works as symptoms of the changes taking place in the culture at the turn of the 20th century.