1861–1941 · Bengali poet, essayist & composer; 1913 Nobel laureate in Literature
Rabindranath Tagore was the towering figure of modern Bengali literature and the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1913), largely on the strength of his own English translation of Gitanjali. Stray Birds (1916) is a collection of several hundred brief, epigrammatic verses he rendered into English from his Bengali. His genuinely aphoristic style makes him an easy magnet for both real short quotes and later paraphrases.