Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali poet, visual artist, playwright, novelist, and composer whose works renewed Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was Asia's first Nobel laureate when he won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Three of his most prominent works are included here: Gitanjali is a cycle of 103 poems about the bliss of living and dying in wonder of the creation, while Stray Birds is a collection of some 300 poems. The poems are short but profound and the imagery lingers. The novel, The Home and the World is set on an estate in 1908; it’s a blend of love story and political intrigue against the background of the conflict in India.