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    Tagore: The Mystic Poets
    Tagore: The Mystic Poets
    Tagore: The Mystic Poets
    Ebook125 pages1 hour

    Tagore: The Mystic Poets

    By Rabindranath Tagore and Swami Adiswarananda

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    Discover How Tagore’s Spiritual Life and Vision Can Enlighten Your Own

    "Rabindranath Tagore’s philosophical and spiritual thoughts transcend all limits of language, culture, and nationality. In his writings, the poet and mystic takes us on a spiritual quest and gives us a glimpse of the infinite in the midst of the finite, unity at the heart of all diversity, and the Divine in all beings and things of the universe."
    —from the Preface bySwami Adiswarananda

    Rabindranath Tagore is one of the most influential mystic poets and teachers of the last century. Deeply spiritual and profoundly sensitive, his verse speaks to people from all backgrounds who seek a deeper understanding of self, country, creation, God, and love.

    This beautiful sampling of Tagore’s two most important works, The Gardener and Gitanjali, offers a glimpse into his spiritual vision that has inspired people around the world. Poems from The Gardener explore youth and earthly love, while excerpts from Gitanjali express divine love and Tagore’s difficulty in satisfying it.

    Overwhelmingly mystical and lovely in its simplicity, this unique collection offers insight into Tagore’s heavenly desires, his ongoing quest for Brahama Vihara, the joy eternal, and illuminates the remarkable diversity that made him the most important bridge between the spirituality of the East and West in the first half of the twentieth century.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTurner Publishing Company
    Release dateMay 9, 2013
    ISBN9781594735370
    Tagore: The Mystic Poets
    Author

    Rabindranath Tagore

    Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was an Indian poet, composer, philosopher, and painter from Bengal. Born to a prominent Brahmo Samaj family, Tagore was raised mostly by servants following his mother’s untimely death. His father, a leading philosopher and reformer, hosted countless artists and intellectuals at the family mansion in Calcutta, introducing his children to poets, philosophers, and musicians from a young age. Tagore avoided conventional education, instead reading voraciously and studying astronomy, science, Sanskrit, and classical Indian poetry. As a teenager, he began publishing poems and short stories in Bengali and Maithili. Following his father’s wish for him to become a barrister, Tagore read law for a brief period at University College London, where he soon turned to studying the works of Shakespeare and Thomas Browne. In 1883, Tagore returned to India to marry and manage his ancestral estates. During this time, Tagore published his Manasi (1890) poems and met the folk poet Gagan Harkara, with whom he would work to compose popular songs. In 1901, having written countless poems, plays, and short stories, Tagore founded an ashram, but his work as a spiritual leader was tragically disrupted by the deaths of his wife and two of their children, followed by his father’s death in 1905. In 1913, Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first lyricist and non-European to be awarded the distinction. Over the next several decades, Tagore wrote his influential novel The Home and the World (1916), toured dozens of countries, and advocated on behalf of Dalits and other oppressed peoples.

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      Book preview

      Tagore - Rabindranath Tagore

      Preface

      Swami Adiswarananda

      In his introduction to Tagore’s Gitanjali, William Butler Yeats makes the following remark: We write long books where no page perhaps has any quality to make writing a pleasure, being confident in some general design, just as we fight and make money and fill our heads with politics—all dull things in the doing—while Mr. Tagore, like the Indian civilization itself, has been content to discover the soul and surrender himself to its spontaneity.

      An immensely versatile poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, composer, and artist, Rabindranath Tagore’s presence is felt everywhere in India. Gitanjali (Song Offerings), a collection of poems for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, was published in English translation in London the previous year. In the words of the Nobel Foundation, the award was given because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh, and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West.

      The fourteenth child of Devendranath Tagore, Rabindranath was born in Calcutta and wrote his first verse when he was eight. Quite early in his life he came under the influence of the Brahmo Samaj, the religious movement of which his father Devendranath Tagore was the leader. Devendranath introduced his son to the great religious literature of India—the Upanishads. Poetry was Rabindranath Tagore’s life breath. His religion is the religion of a poet; Plato banished poets from his ideal republic, but to Tagore, poetry’s mission is to occupy people’s lives and not merely exist for scholarly enjoyment. With Tagore, the infinite becomes the finite without losing its infinity. The finite is the dynamic manifestation of the infinite. God, according to Tagore, is the Supreme Person seated in the hearts of all. The goal of spiritual quest is to become united with that infinite Person or God.

      Tagore sees creation as the revelation of truth. His mystic mind gets absorbed in his Personal God and becomes an instrument in God’s hands. The freedom-loving poet and mystic Tagore, with his spiritual vision, advocates a poet’s religion that is all embracing and all loving.

      Tagore had a deep regard for the nineteenth-century God-man and prophet of the harmony of faiths, Sri Ramakrishna (1836–1886), and his foremost disciple Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902). In his beautiful homage to Sri Ramakrishna Tagore writes:

      Diverse courses of worship

      from varied springs of fulfillment

      have mingled in your meditation.

      The manifold revelation of the joy of the Infinite

      has given form to a shrine of unity in your life.

      Where from far and near arrive salutations

      to which I join mine own.

      In regard to Swami Vivekananda, Tagore told the noted French savant Romain Rolland, If you want to know India, study Vivekananda (quoted in World Thinkers on Ramakrishna-Vivekananda, edited by Swami Lokeswarananda, pp. 10, 34).

      Rabindranath Tagore’s philosophical and spiritual thoughts transcend all limits of language, culture, and nationality. In his writings, the poet and mystic Tagore takes us on a spiritual quest and gives us a glimpse of the infinite in the midst of the finite, unity at the heart of all diversity, and the Divine in all beings and things of the universe.

      Swami Adiswarananda,

      Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York

      Who Is Rabindranath Tagore?

      Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) is widely considered the greatest influence in modern Indian literature. In his native land of Bengal—which is known today as the country of Bangladesh—his influence is equal to that of Shakespeare throughout the English-speaking world. His songs are sung in elementary schools, and his poems and other writings are the subject of numerous theses and dissertations at the universities each year. Indians revere Tagore as an artist, sage, reformer, and spiritual leader; Tagore’s work and life are the subject of frequent conferences and books that deal with what his vision might mean for the future of India.

      He made a significant contribution to education, expanding his father’s small school into a university and instituting reforms that are in place to this day; created a new form of Indian musical composition; founded an important ashram; became a vital conduit of Indian culture to the Western world at a time when Britain and India were warring with each other; and, late in life, while exploring his own emergence as a visual artist, introduced modern and abstract painting to his people. Tagore was innovative in writing his poetry in the vernacular Bengali language rather than in the traditional Sanskrit—thereby almost single-handedly creating what is now Bengali literature—and his poetry evokes the flavor of the real Indian countryside, not the Anglicized India of the colonial period.

      Tagore’s influence has also been felt around the world. His books have been translated into numerous languages, and his verse speaks to people from all backgrounds who seek a deeper understanding of self, country, creation, God, and love. People have hungered for Tagore’s wisdom; in the last two decades of the Soviet Union, in the 1970s and 1980s, more than a million copies of his books were sold in translation, despite (or perhaps because of) their obvious spiritual themes.

      His vast literary output, the remarkable diversity of his talents, and his wide range of personal influence made him perhaps the most important bridge between the spirituality of the East and the West in the first half of the twentieth century.

      An accomplished poet, novelist, short story writer, painter, playwright, philosopher, and educator, Tagore first achieved fame in the West when

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