Rabindranath Tagore

Krishna Dutta

"These prose translations from Rabindranath Tagore have stirred my blood as nothing has for years," wrote W.B. Yeats in 1912, a year before Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming the first Asian writer so honored. Traveling the world for several decades and sharing both his artistic and spiritual gifts with millions, Tagore was praised and admired in his time like no other twentieth-century writer as a spiritual seer and a literary genius. This biography, the product of more than ten years of research and collaboration between the authors, is the first work in many decades to disentangle the profound and perplexing contradictions that made Tagore such a fascinating and pivotal figure. He was one of the very first to perceive that - despite the great geographic and cultural distance between them - East and West would be compelled to meet in the twentieth century. Truly myriad-minded, Tagore expressed the pleasure and pain of this encounter in poetry, songwriting, and painting. "I can now imagine a powerful and gentle Christ, which I never could before," Charles Darwin's granddaughter told a friend after meeting Rabindranath. Focusing more on the man than his art and drawing extensively on newly uncovered material, Rabindranath Tagore brings to life a brilliant artist and his complicated times. Passionate, compelling, and insightful, Tagore's story has the power to move its readers in the very core of their being.