Rabindranath Tagore is regarded as one of the greatest writers in modern Indian literature. Tagore started to compose poems at the age of eight. His first book, a collection of poems, appeared when he was 17. In 1901 Tagore founded a school outside Calcutta, Visva-Bharati, which was dedicated to emerging Western and Indian philosophy and education. Tagore's reputation as a writer was established in the United States and in England after the publication of Gitanjali:Song Offerings, in which Tagore tried to find inner calm and explored the themes of divine and human love. Between the years 1916 and 1934 he travelled widely, attempting to spread the ideal of uniting East and West. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Tagore was awarded the knighthood in 1915, but he surrendered it in 1919 as a protest against the Massacre of Amritsar.
