As a young man, Rabindranath Tagore wrote a series of letters to his niece during what he described as the most productive period of his life. By turns contemplative and playful, gentle and impassioned, Tagore's letters abound in incredible insights - from sharply comical portrayals of English sahibs to lively anecdotes about family life, from thoughts on the nature of poetry to spiritual contemplation and inner feeling and coursing through all these letters, like a ceaseless heartbeat, is Tagore's deep love for the natural splendor of Bengal. In this manner, this volume also serves as a prose companion to his magnificent work Gitanjali.

Letters from a Young Poet shimmers with wit and warmth and offers unforgettable vignettes of the young poet in those happy days before extraordinary fame found him.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. He produced some sixty collections of verse, nearly a hundred short stories, several novels, plays, dance dramas, essays on religious, social and literary topics and over 2500 songs, including the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.

Rosinka Chaudhuri completed her DPhil at Oxford University and is a professor in the cultural studies department at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. She has been visiting fellow at the Southern Asian Institute, Columbia University and Charles Wallace Fellow at Cambridge University. She is the author of Gentlemen Poets in Colonial Bengal, Freedom and Beef-Steaks and The Literary Thing. She has edited Derozio, Poet of India and co-edited The Indian Postcolonial.