People around the world know Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), India’s Nobel Prize winning poet, as the poet of Gitanjali, in which he wrote about spiritual matters and about his Lord, beloved and friend and thus as mystic. He was far from it. No Indian poet since Kalidas wrote so much about man and nature. European poetry is mainly about man and nature whereas Indian poetry is primarily about devotion to God. The principal driving force of Tagore’s poetry was his humanism. He paid his greatest homage to man and not to nature or even to God. In this respect Tagore’s poetry is close to the western mind and surprisingly divergent from the main flow of Indian poetry. Whatever in this world touched Tagore’s heart, he gave artistic and skilful expression to it, not by analytical reasoning or from any particular ideology, but from his innermost feelings. This he did in an unending variety and innovative poetical style. Tagore’s genius as a great literary figure and thinker of the twentieth century remains undiscovered by people within and outside India because only a fraction of his works has been translated even sixty years after his death. This book presents Tagore’s poems from his very early years to his last poem, written a week before his death. This is the first time that Tagore’s poems have been translated into English, following the rhyming scheme of the original poems in Bengali. The poems are arranged chronologically and with a review of Tagore’s poetry as it moved through different periods and unfolded his genius in its full glory.
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