Sir Rabindranath Tagore's most famous work is the Gitanjali, a book of poems that reached a wide audience after it was given a preface by William Butler Yeats. Tagore is one of the most famous and highly regarded of authors from modern India. The name is a pseudonym of Ravindranath Thakura, though the name has been transliterated with several different spellings. In addition to being a poet, he was also a playwright, novelist, short story writer, essayist, and philosopher.
Tagore was born in 1861 and died in 1941. His was an upper-cast Hindu family, and he was raised on an estate in Calcutta. he was educated by private tutors, and he started writing poetry when he was eight years old. He made his first trip to England in 1878 to attend schools and universities in Brighton and London, and he read extensively in English and European literature at this time. He was placed in charge of the family estates in 1890, and each day he was brought into contact with local peasants and farmers whose suffering roused his sympathy. he became interested in the plight of India's poor, and he would remain a conscientious and vocal proponent of agricultural and educational reform for decades. In 1901 he founded a school at his retreat at Santiniketan and devoted this institution to the intellectual freedom of the individual. He modeled it after the tapovana, or "forest schools," of ancient India. The school later developed into an international university called Visva-Bharati, or "Universal Wisdom" ("Rabindranath Tagore" 331).
Tagore went o a tour of England and the United States in 1912 and made the acquaintance of such eminent literary figures as Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, and George Bernard Shaw, among others. Gitanjali was published in English in 1912 and contained an adulatory preface by Yeats. The book made Tagore famous in the West, and in 1913 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. After World War I, Tagore joined Shaw...