On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. Tempest roams in the pathless sky, ships are wrecked in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play. On the seashore of endless worlds is the great meeting of children.
        (On the Seashore)

1. The Child (excerpt)
2. Crossing 16
3. Fruit-gathering XXXVI
4. Fruit-gathering LV
5. The Gardener 38
6. The Gardener 66
7. The Gardener 85
8. Gitanjali 35
9. The Last Bargain
10. On the Seashore
11. Playthings

Notes on Life and Works

Born May 6 (some sources say May 7), 1861, in Calcutta, Rabindranath Tagore became one of the prolific writers in the world, poet, artist, dramatist, musician, novelist, and essayist. He was completely at home both in Bengali and in English, in part because he was educated at University College, London, in 1879-80. He had become the national poet of Bengal by the time of his Golden Jubilee in Calcutta on January 28, 1912, but his international fame only came in November 1913 when he won the Nobel Prize for literature for Gitanjali, a collection of poetry initially brought out in Bengali in 1910 and then translated by the poet and published in English in 1912 with an introduction by W. B. Yeats. He translated so many volumes of his own Benjali poems personally that he can be regarded as an Anglo-Indian poet. Tagore resided at Shantiniketan and Ashram and founded a school at the former place that turned into Visva-Bharati University in 1918, the present-day holder of the Tagore copyright (which ran out on January 1, 2002). Mrinalini Devi Raichaudhuri and he wed, in an arranged marriage, Dec. 9, 1883, and they had five children: three daughters, Madhurilata, Renuka, and Mira, and two sons, Rathindranath and Samindranath. Tagore obtained honorary degrees from the universities of Calcutta (1913), Dacca (1936), Osmania (1938), and Oxford (1940). He died August 7, 1941, in Calcutta, and was cremated.

Primary Works

• Tagore, Rabindranath. Collected Poems and Plays. London: Macmillan, 1936.  UofT call number: PR 6039 A2 1936 Robarts Library
• Tagore, Rabindranath. Collected Poems and Plays. New York: Macmillan, 1943.  UofT call number: PR 6039 A2 1943 Robarts Library "by request"
• Tagore, Rabindranath. Fireflies. New York: Macmillan, 1965.  UofT call number: PR 6039 .A2F5 Erindale College Library
• Tagore, Rabindranath. Fruit-gathering. New York: Macmillan, 1916.  UofT call number: PR 6039 A2F7 Robarts Library
• Tagore, Rabindranath. Gitanjali [song offerings]: a collection of prose translations made by the author from the original Bengali. Intro. W. B. Yeats. London: Chiswick Press for the India Society, 1912. (Available at the University of Virginia Electronic Text Center)  UofT call number: PR 6039 A2G6 1913 Robarts Library
• Tagore, Rabindranath. Lover's Gift and Crossing. London: Macmillan, 1918.  UofT call number: PR 6039 A2L6 Robarts Library
• Tagore, Rabindranath. Reminiscences. 1917. (Autobiography.)
• Tagore, Rabindranath. Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore. Ed. Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.  UofT call number: PK 1725 A45 1997 Robarts Library
• Tagore, Rabindranath. Selections. Ed. Edward Thompson. London: Oxford University Press, 1925.
• Tagore, Rabindranath. The Child. 1931. (Translated into Bangali as Sishutirtha.)
• Tagore, Rabindranath. The Crescent Moon. Trans. by the author. London: Macmillan, 1913.  UofT call number: PR 6039 A2C7 Robarts Library
• Tagore, Rabindranath. The Fugitive and Other Poems. Santiniketan, 1921.
• Tagore, Rabindranath. The Gardener. Trans. by the author. New York: Macmillan, 1913.  UofT call number: PR 6039 A2G3 1913 Robarts Library

Secondary Works

• Henn, Katherine. Rabindranath Tagore: A Bibliography. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press; Philadelphia: American Theological Library Association, 1985.  UofT call number: Z 8857.9 H46 1985 Robarts Library
• Iyengar, K. R. Srinivasa. Indian Writing in English. 2nd edn. Bombay: Asia, 1973.
• Kabir. One Hundred Poems of Kabir. Trans. Rabindranath Tagore assisted by Evelyn Underhill. London: Macmillan, 1915.  UofT call number: PK 2095 K33A28 1915 Robarts Library
• Lago, Mary M.. Rabindranath Tagore. Twayne, 1976.
• Singh, Durlab. The Sentinel of the East, a Biographical Study of Rabindra Nath Tagore. New York: Haskell House, 1974.  UofT call number: PK 1725 S5 1974 Robarts Library

Biographical information

Given name: Rabindranath
Family name: Tagore
Birth date: 6 May 1861
Death date: 7 August 1941
Ethnicity: Bengali
Family relations
          wife: Mrinalini Devi Raichaudhuri
          son: Rathindranath Tagore
          son: Samindranath Tagore
          daughter: Madhurilata Tagore
          daughter: Mira Tagore
          daughter: Renuka Tagore
Languages
          English
          Bengali
Education: University College, London: 1879 to 1880
Honour: Nobel Prize for Literature: November 1913
Residences
          Ashram, India
          Shantiniketan, India
          Calcutta: 1861 to 1941
          London, England: 1879 to 1880
Buried at: Calcutta (cremated)
First RPO edition: 2002