Book description
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) is India's greatest modern poet and
the most brilliant creative genius produced by the Indian Renaissance.
As well as poetry, he wrote songs, stories and novels, plays, essays,
memoirs and travelogues. He was both a restless innovator and a superb
craftsman, and the Bengali language attained great beauty and power in
his hands. He created his own genre of dance drama and is one of the
most important visual artists of modern India. He won the Nobel Prize
in Literature in 1913. Tagore's poetry has an impressive wholeness: a
magnificent loving warmth, compassionate humanity, a delicate
sensuousness, an intense sense of kinship with nature and a burning
awareness of man's place in the universe. He moves with effortless
ease from the literal to the symbolic, from the part of the whole,
from a tiny detail to the vast cosmos. He is religious in the deepest
sense, wavering between a faith that sustains the spirit in times of
crisis -- or fills it with energy and joy in times of happiness -- and
a profound questioning that can find no enduring answers. To him the
earth is a vulnerable mother who clings to all her offspring, saying
'I won't let you go' to the tiniest blade of grass that springs from
her womb, but who is powerless to prevent the decay and death of her children.
