Rabindranath Tagore Quotes
God waits to win back his own flowers as gifts from man's hands.
Tagore, Rabindranath. Stray Birds. The Macmillan Company, 1916, p. 39.
This is a very important quotation because it reflects the attitude of many of the leading American expansionists and imperialists of the period—ie that American imperialism would uplift peoples around the world. This was an extension of the religious motive of many of the British imperialists who referred to the “3 Cs”: Commerce, Civilization & Christianity. Seelye himself was a missionary of the Protestant Dutch Reformed Church.
Rabindranath Tagore FRAS was a Bengali poet, writer, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter. He reshaped Bengali literature and music, as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse" of Gitanjali, he became in 1913 the first non-European as well as the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore's poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal. He is sometimes referred to as "the Bard of Bengal".
