Special thanks to @smiling_soul for recommending Rabindranath Tagore to discuss!
❝I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.❞
-- Rabindranath Tagore
A poet, short-story writer, song composer, playwright, essayist, and painter, Rabindranath Tagore, Bengali Rabīndranāth Ṭhākur, who introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial language into Bengali literature. He was born May 7, 1861 in Calcutta [now Kolkata], India. He was influential in introducing Indian culture to the West and vice versa. In 1913 he became the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.
His father, Debendranath Tagore, was a leader of the Brahmo Samaj, which was a new religious sect in the nineteenth-century Bengal. Rabindranath was homeschooled, and when he turned seventeen he went to England to attend school, he did not finish his studies there. He began writing prose and verses around that time. He published several books of poetry in the 1880s and finished Manasi (1890) [The Ideal One], a collection that marks the maturing of his genius. It contains some of his best-known poems that focus on some social and political satire. In 1894, he wrote poem collection titled Sonar Tari [The Golden Boat]. At this time, he managed his family's estate and often stayed in a boathouse on the Padma River.
In 1912, he wrote Gitanjali [Song Offerings] which focuses on grief and reflects on his wife and his two children's death. This book contains Tagore's English Prose translations of religious poems, including Gitanjali, was hailed by W.B. Yeats and André Gide. Rabindranath was awarded knighthood in 1915, but he repudiated it in 1919 as a protest against the Amritsar (Jallianwalla Bagh) Massacre. He had early success as a writer. With his translations, some of his poems became well known in the West. He passed away August 7, 1941 in Calcutta, India.
Discussion Questions:
Which Rabindranath's poem has inspired or made an impact on you?
What prose do you write in? And what prose do you wish to explore?
How does songwriting and poetry connect? Similarities?
Always open to additional questions and comments on about Rabindranath Tagore and his works.
If there is another author you would like to see a discussion on, please post your suggestion in the comments below for a chance to be featured in a future chapter!
Resources:
Rabindranath Tagore Biographical