and other works. Here, his wife died young and
he lost a son and a daughter. His profound grief
affected the tone of his work.
Tagore had developed a large following among
Bengali readers; some English translations of his
work had been made, but they were not of high
quality. At the urging of some of his English admir-
ers he started translating some of his own poems
in free verse. In 1912, he went to England to read
some of these. It was his fortune to be heard at
these readings by the celebrated Irish poet Wil-
liam Butler Yeats. The English version of Gitanjali
(Song Offerings) (1915) was later published by the
India Society with an admiring preface by Yeats.
In November 1913 Tagore was awarded the Nobel
Prize in literature, based on the attention that this
translation had drawn.
His literary fame established at the age of 60,
Tagore began to paint and exhibit his paintings in
India and Europe. He painted in a wistful mod-
ernist style that was as impressive as his literary
work. Deeply beloved in his home of Bengal,
Tagore is the only person in the world to have
composed two national anthems, India’s and
Bangladesh’s. His love for his country, India, was
well known and he joined others of his generation
in doing what he could to contribute to the great
struggle for independence. He carried on a cor-Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Bengali poet, educator, and Nobel Prize laureate (Courtesy Library of Congress)
K 434 Tagore, Rabindranath