“That was a most astonishing literary announcement,” observed "The New York Times" in 1913, after the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The paper described him as “entirely unknown outside his own country.” Soon, however, American publishers would turn to Tagore, with his long white beard and flowing robes, as a prolific source of Eastern wisdom—and Western criticism. The Atlantic’s editors, who published five essays and poems by Tagore from 1913 to 1929, urged readers “to listen with minds at least partly open” to the writer’s assessment of the United States and its flaws.           

What Tagore found in the U.S. dismayed him: the worship of power and money; the exploitation of the weak by the strong. The country, he wrote, shared the same impulse as other Western nations to conquer and denigrate less powerful peoples, even if that impulse ultimately “carries its own death sentence.” This moral failing will eventually become “the most terrible of all its burdens.”               

That Tagore saw a basic similarity between the United States and Great Britain—which at the time straddled a worldwide empire (including Tagore’s native India) and did whatever was necessary to maintain it—may not have been the preferred self-image of The Atlantic’s editors. They cherished the freedom-giving potential of “the American idea.” Tagore stood in a long tradition of literary-minded foreigners whose insights into the United States have proved by turns enchanting and challenging—and sometimes emphatically clear-headed.