Literary Treasures | A Conversation on Gitanjali with Michael Sowder

As part of our Treasures of World Literature series, Michael Sowder, Professor of Sacred Literature at Utah State University, discusses Gitanjali, a collection of spiritual, devotional poems by the Nobel Prize-winning Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He came from an illustrious Bengali family and was celebrated not only for poetry, but for novels, plays, paintings, and songs. As part of the Bengali renaissance, he was an ardent early voice for India’s independence from Britain. Gitanjali lives within a long tradition of bhakti poetry, a tradition of devotional poetry focused on longing and ecstatic union with the Divine Beloved.