By Randy Fiedler

On Valentine’s Day 1921, Baylor University welcomed Rabinadrath Tagore, the acclaimed Hindu poet, seer, dramatist, essayist and short story writer, to campus.

Tagore was born to wealthy parents in Calcutta, India, in 1861. By age eight he was writing poetry, and he had released his first substantial poems at age 16. In 1913, he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Tagore spoke in Baylor’s Carroll Chapel on Feb. 14 and delivered a lecture titled “When the East Meets the West.” The Lariat reported, “He told of the long search for truth by the Indian philosophers, of how the west in its haste had often seemed to scorn that which had been acquired by so long and painful seeking…The materialism of the west and its rush for power and gain, its building of great industrial plants at the expense of the beauties of nature, were condemned by Tagore, as leading to false ideas of greatness.”

After his lecture Tagore delighted his Baylor audience by reading a number of lyrics from his popular book of childhood poems, The Crescent Moon, and then recited one of the national hymns of Bengali in both Hindu and English.

Source: Baylor Lariat, Feb. 17, 1921