Derozio, whom I mentioned earlier, was a good poet after the manner of early Byron or Thomas Campbell; and a later and equally influential teacher at Hindu College – Captain D. L. Richardson – was an excellent critic and a good lyric poet. Richardson published a number of miscellaneous essays and poems (Literary Leaves, 1836, Literary Chit-chat, 1848, Literary Recreations, 1852), and in his time he was the literary leader of the British community in Calcutta – with whom writing verse had long been a popular pastime. They influenced some Bengalis to do the same. The foremost Bengali poet before Tagore, Michael Madhusudan Datta, began his career by writing in English: his poem The Captive Ladie (1849) shows the influence of Byron and Moore; other poems, more interestingly, show the influence of Keats. By the time Tagore started writing, Madhusudan had already shown the futility of writing poetry in English, and Tagore never attempted it (he wrote only one original poem in English, The Child, written after seeing the Oberammergau Passion Play in 1930). But his youthful contact with English poetry is well attested. He was made to translate Macbeth into Bengali by a tutor when he was twelve; his early volume kari o kamal (Sharps and Flats, 1886) includes translations of Shelley, Victor Hugo, Mrs Browning, Christina Rossetti, Swinburne, Hood, Aubrey de Vere, Moore and others. Indeed as a young poet he was sometimes called the ‘Shelley of Bengal’, because of the habit of identifying Bengali writers with English writers (Madhusudan was the ‘Milton of Bengal’, Bankim was the ‘Scott of Bengal’, and so on). English poetry meant less and less to Tagore as time went on, but the seeds had been sown. A poem like ‘On the Edge of the Sea’ is to an English reader a strange mixture of the foreign and the familiar: it is both Indian and Keatsian. English poetic influence (mainly Romantic poetry, major and minor, and Shakespeare) is the point of contact between us and Indian poetry of the last century-and-a-half.

English poetic influence on Tagore seduced Edward Thompson into seeing him as an essentially nineteenth-century poet, a coeval of Tennyson and Swinburne; and Thompson’s translations certainly made him seem like that. But this is wrong. Although Tagore started in the nineteenth century, he became a Modern, never detaching his poetry from the times in which he lived, always striving to extend his range and break literary conventions. This was an aspect of the continual progress in him that I have already described.

But there is an important difference between Tagore and the major Moderns of Europe. Joyce, Pound, Stravinsky, Picasso – all have built on Romanticism but at the same time tried to break it up. Subsequent generations of artists have cut their links with it completely. Tagore, however, carried his romanticism intact into the modern world, used it as a sceptre and a torch. Thus to children of the neo-Romanticism of the 1960s, my own era, he is a sympathetic voice. His educational ideals, his anti-materialism, his feminism, his version of the spiritual are all, to my own generation, familiar. In these he is near.

Tagore’s idealism sets him apart: it also makes him human. The way to read Tagore is emphatically not to sit at his feet, to look to him for wisdom. This is the mistake his contemporary admirers made: it did him no good, made fools of them, and could not last. The way to read Tagore is to see limitations in his faith, vulnerability in his striving. Tagore’s whole career as a writer was a progress towards greater and greater honesty. His late poems, most of them put straight down with no metre, no rhyme, no deliberate artifice, should not be read as progress towards greater and greater enlightenment, mukti, spiritual fulfilment: read in that way – as wisdom instead of poetry – they will seem feeble and insipid. They are rather an ever more naked self-exposure. A poem such as ‘Recovery – 14’, about a pet dog, restates Tagore’s Religion of Man: read as such, it will carry no more conviction than the words of an Anglican hymn. Rather, one should sense its implicit suggestion: ‘Here I am, a vulnerable and ignorant human being.