Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941)

Rabindranath Tagore was born in Calcutta into a family that produced poets, musicians and reformers. He wrote his first poem at eight. By thirty he had written hundreds of songs in Bengali. He ran a school in rural Bengal where children studied under trees.

In 1910 he began translating some of his own poems into English. He chose prose, not verse. He poured Bengali songs into English paragraphs and watched what survived the crossing.

His English is unlike any other English poet's. It sounds like a man speaking carefully in a language that was not built for what he needs to say. The images are concrete — vessels, rivers, lamps, dust — but they hold something substantial that the words only point toward.

He received the Nobel Prize in 1913. He was the first non-European laureate. He later returned his British knighthood in protest against the Amritsar massacre of 1919.

He was not in Stockholm and gave no Nobel Lecture. He sent a telegram to the banquet (1913), thanking the Academy for an understanding "which has brought the distant near, and has made a stranger a brother". Read it at NobelPrize.org.