

By 1877 he graduated to his first short stories and dramas, published under his real name. At the age of sixteen, he released his first substantial poems under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha ("Sun Lion"), which were seized upon by literary authorities as long-lost classics. Ī Bengali Brahmin from Calcutta with ancestral gentry roots in Burdwan district and Jessore, Tagore wrote poetry as an eight-year-old. Referred to as "the Bard of Bengal", Tagore was known by sobriquets: Gurudeb, Kobiguru, Biswokobi. He was a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. Tagore's poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal. Author of the "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful" poetry of Gitanjali, he became in 1913 the first non-European and the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He reshaped Bengali literature and music as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore FRAS ( / r ə ˈ b ɪ n d r ə n ɑː t t æ ˈ ɡ ɔːr/ ( listen) Bengali: রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর pronounced – 7 August 1941) was a Bengali polymath who worked as a poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter.
