I Won't Let You Go and Selected Poems

Name: Rabindranath Tagore

Year Won: 1913

Read: "I Won't Let You Go"

Original Language: Bengali and some English (maybe?) Reason: "because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West"

About: There are a lot of poems. A lot of them. Some felt like the kinds previously goth-me would love (e.g "The Suicide of a Star"...isn't that an amazing name!). Others were more erotic evocative love poetry. A lot were really long, but none were really epic. Mostly it was a lot of well...poetry.

What I Liked: I like poetry and some of the darker ones really made me think, "Oh, yeah, that was me when I was fifteen and hanging out with the people who smoked cloves." (I didn't. I was too much of a nerd.) Then some of the later ones felt so achingly beautiful and real.

What I Disliked: A lot of the later poems struck me as kind of same-ish. Like, I get that there's yet another alluring woman in a sari, but try to mix it up, alright? Rap artists can manage it, so why can't you?

Should it have won a Nobel: Probably? I enjoyed the poems, but I also feel that poetry is inherently more subjective than prose so who knows?

Next up: Jean-Christophe by Romain Rolland