, Bertrand Russell, and other advocates of pacifism as they denounced the kind of destructive nationalism practiced by many of the leaders in Europe. Tagore continued to champion individual freedom, democracy, and internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s as the world was faced with the rise of fascism. Tagore died in 1941 ("Rabindranath Tagore" 331).
Indian critic Buddhadeva Bose wrote in 1948 that Tagore was a phenomenon. he says that Tagore was not the greatest poet he had experienced, but he does say that he was one of the most important, especially for India. he fines that tagore's unique merit is found in his quantity, his range, and his versatility. His importance to India is also something that cannot be over-emphasized:
Rabindranath is our Chaucer and our Shakespeare, our Dryden, and our equivalent of the English translators of the bible. To describe him in terms of English literature, one must name quite a number of authors, for he compresses in one man's lifetime the development of several centuries (Bose 2).
Tagore's poetry contains a philosophy that was derived in part from certain religious and intellectual currents of the time. Readers of the poetry will receive an impression of metaphysical variety in the poems, even in those poems that are not explicitly religious. During Tagore's youth, the influence of the bhakti movement in India and of Bengali Vaishnavism in particular permeated Bengali culture and had a resurgence during Tagore's formative years. This philosophy helped Tagore shape himself and his view of the world:
Being a poet, he easily and naturally thought, wrote, and spoke metaphorically, even when he dealt with prosaic subjects. The metaphors that came naturally to mind were the Vaishnava and related metaphors, in all their variations upon the theme of the intimate personal relation between God and the human soul (Lago 39-40).
This philosophy was one involving an everlasting sear...