Aesthesis

Rabindranath Tagore, anglicized from Rabindranath Thakurα (May 7, 1861–August 7, 1941), was a Bengali polymath who reshaped literature and music in his region. Author of Gitanjali and its “profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse”, he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. In translation his poetry was viewed as spiritual and mercurial; his seemingly mesmeric personality, flowing hair, and otherworldly dress earned him a prophet-like reputation in the West. His “elegant prose and magical poetry” remain largely unknown outside Bengal. Tagore introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial language into Bengali literature, thereby freeing it from traditional models based on classical Sanskrit. He was highly influential in introducing the best of Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and he is generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of modern India. Tagore started writing poetry as an eight-year-old, and at age sixteen he released his first substantial poems under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha (or “Sun Lion”), which were seized upon by literary authorities as long-lost classics. The work of a titan, he wrote over one thousand poems, nearly two dozen plays and playlets, eight novels, more than eight volumes of short stories and over two thousands songs, and a mass of prose on literary, social, religious, political, and other topics. On top of these, his English translations, paintings, travels and lecture-tours in Asia, America, and Europe, and his activities as educationist, social and religious reformer, and politician granted him the universalist title he defended to his last days. Through the psychographed work of Divaldo Franco, he comes back to us, as elegant as in the physical life, speaking of love, God, and beauty with poetry that elevates even the hardest of souls in the greatest Indian tradition called the Bhakti from the VII century CE.