Gitanjali

Gitanjali, 'Song Offerings', is a collection of short prose poems that Rabindranath Tagore translated into English himself from his Bengali songs. They are prayers and meditations on God, nature, love, death and the soul's longing, written in simple, luminous language: 'Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high...'.

The English Gitanjali appeared in 1912 with an introduction by W. B. Yeats, and the next year Tagore became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The poems are short, so they are perfect to read one at a time; continue with his lectures in Sadhana.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was born in Calcutta, the youngest son of a great Bengali family of reformers and artists. He wrote poems, stories, novels, plays and some two thousand songs, and his songs became the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh.

He founded a school in the countryside at Santiniketan, which grew into a university, and in 1913 became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize, for Gitanjali. In 1919 he returned his British knighthood in protest at the massacre at Amritsar. The Home and the World and The Post Office show his range.