A brilliant and innovatory novelist, playwright, painter, educator and musician, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was also an outstanding poet and is universally recognized as the major classic writer of Bengal.

During his prolific and highly influential career, he was a leading figure in the Indian nationalist movement; an intimate of Gandhi; composer of the Indian National Anthem; a powerful educational thinker; and a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. But despite his importance, Tagore is a writer who is familiar to very few Western readers.

William Radice’s selection provides a long overdue appraisal of his poetry and does full justice to the dignity, power and sense of harmony that pervade this great man’s moving and lyrical verses.