Impressions on ‘Abdu’l-Baha

Impact on Yone Naguchi

Source:A New Cycle of Human Power: Abdu’l-Baha’s Encounters with Modernist Writers and Artists 

In time, ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s fame reached and impacted modernists much farther afield than the cities in which He spoke. In August 1911, the influential Japanese writer Yone Noguchi had sent Ezra Pound two books of his poems. Pound was very taken with Noguchi’s work, saying, “If east and west are ever to understand each other that understanding must come slowly and come first through art.”

Noguchi later learned of ‘Abdu’l-Baha from Agnes Alexander, a Hawaiian-born Baha’i who had been sent by Him to share the Baha’i Teachings in Japan. Noguchi wrote:

I have heard so much about ‘Abdu’l-Baha, whom people call an idealist, but I should like to call Him a realist, because no idealism, when it is strong and true, exists without the endorsement of realism. There is nothing more real than His words on truth. His words are as simple as the sunlight; again like the sunlight, they are universal. … No Teacher, I think, is more important today than ‘Abdu’l-Baha.