Rabindranath Tagore (; ), also written Ravindranatha Thakura (7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941), sobriquet
Gurudev, was a
Bengali polymath who reshaped
Bengali literature and
music, as well as
Indian art with
Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of
Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", he became the first non-European to win the
Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. In translation his poetry was viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal. Sometimes referred to as "the
Bard of Bengal", Tagore introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial language into Bengali literature, thereby freeing it from traditional models based on classical
Sanskrit. He was highly influential in introducing the best of Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and he is generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of the modern Indian subcontinent.