![]() ![]() "There is in him the stillness of nature. The poems appeared in 1912 with an introduction by the great William Butler Yates, who wrote "These lyrics - which are in the original, my Indians tell me, full of subtlety of rhythm, of untranslatable delicacies of colour, of metrical invention - display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my life long." His poems were praised by Ezra Pound, and drew the attention of the Nobel Prize committee. His cosmic visions owed much to the lyric tradition of Vaishnava Hinduism and its concepts about the relationship between man and God. The poems were translated into English by Tagore himself. Tagore's reputation as a writer was established in the United States and in England after the publication of "Gitanjali: Song Offerings", in which Tagore tried to find inner calm and explored the themes of divine and human love. His wife died in 1902, followed in 1903 by the death of one of his daughters and in 1907 his younger son. He produced poems, novels, stories, a history of India, textbooks, and treatises on pedagogy. In 1901 Tagore founded a school outside Calcutta, Visva-Bharati, which was dedicated to emerging Western and Indian philosophy and education. This also was something that was hard to accept among his critics and scholars. This was highly productive period in Tagore's life, and earned him the rather misleading epitaph 'The Bengali Shelley.' More important was that Tagore wrote in the common language of the Bengali people and abandoned the ancient form of the Indian language. In East Bengal (now Bangladesh) Tagore collected local legends and folklore and wrote seven volumes of poetry between 18, including Sonar Tari (The Golden Boat), 1894 and Khanika, 1900. His first book, a collection of poems, had been published when he was 17 it was published by Tagore's friend who wanted to surprise him. Together they had two sons and three daughters. In 1883 Tagore married Mrinalini Devi Raichaudhuri. In England Tagore started to compose the poem Bhagna Hridaj (a broken heart). Once he gave a beggar a gold coin - it was more than the beggar had expected and he returned it. Among them were Bengal Academy where he studied Bengali history and culture, and University College, London, where he studied law (but left after a year without completing his studies). He received his early education first from home-tutors and then at a variety of schools. Tagore, the youngest, started to compose poems at the age of eight. ![]() All the children contributed significantly to Bengali literature and culture. ![]() Servants beat the Tagore children regularly. However, in his "My Reminiscences" Tagore mentions that it was not until the age of ten that he started to wear shoe and socks. The Tagores were pioneers of Bengal's Renaissance and tried to combine traditional Indian culture with Western ideas. Tagore's grandfather had established a huge financial empire for himself, and used it to finance large public projects, such as the Calcutta Medical College. He talked of seeing her body carried through a gate to a place where it was burned - and it was at that moment that he realized that she would never come back. His mother Sarada Devi, died when he was very young. His father was Maharishi Debendranath Tagore, a religious reformer and scholar. Rabindranath Tagore was born in Calcutta in a wealthy and prominent Brahman family. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose touch of the one in the play of the many." (from Gitanjali) When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. ![]() Tagore gained a reputation in the West as a mystic originally and that has perhaps mislead many Western readers to ignore his role as a reformer and critic of colonialism. Tagore was awarded a knighthood in 1915, but he surrendered it in 1919 in protest against the Massacre at Amritsar, where British troops killed around 400 Indian demonstrators. A Bengali poet, novelist, educator, Nobel Laureate for Literature. Rabindranath Tagore was considered the greatest writer in modern Indian literature. ![]()
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