BL. W. B. Yeats

31. ‘To Rabindranath Tagore’. In The Golden Book of Tagore, edited by Ramananda Chatterjee. Calcutta: Golden Book Committee, 1931.

The letter celebrates Tagore’s work and notes Yeats’s interest in ‘Asiatic form’, which he ‘first found in [Tagore’s] books and afterwards in certain Chinese poetry and Japanese prose writers’ (p. 269). The only Japanese prose writers Yeats on his own evidence may be shown to have read are Murasaki Shikibu (Ap, see 52a, 131, and 228), Noguchi (see D15b), Suzuki (see D28), and Kagawa Toyohiko (see 46c), though translations of works by Ki no Tsurayuki (Ap), Kenkô (Ap), and Sei Shônagon (Ap) were in his library (see 228).