| Gitanjali |
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| Culture |
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INTRODUCTION
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poet seems to me as famous in Europe as he is among us. He is as
great in music as in poetry, and his sons are sung from the west of
India into Burma wherever Bengali is spoken. He was already famous
at nineteen when he wrote his first novel; and plays when he was but
little older, are still played in Calcutta. I so much admire the
completeness of his life; when he was very young he wrote much of
natural objects, he would sit all day in his garden; from his
twenty-fifth year or so to his thirty-fifth perhaps, when he had a
great sorrow, he wrote the most beautiful love poetry in our
language'; and then he said with deep emotion, 'words can never
express what I owed at seventeen to his love poetry. After that his
art grew deeper, it became religious and philosophical; all the
inspiration of mankind are in his hymns. He is the first among our
saints who has not refused to live, but has spoken out of Life
itself, and that is why we give him our love.' I may have changed
his well-chosen words in my memory but not his thought. A little
while ago he was to read divine service in one of our churches we of
the Brahma Samaj use your word 'church' in English it was the
largest in Calcutta and not only was it crowded, but the streets
were all but impassable because of the people.'
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