Hindu mystic, poet, teacher, Nobel prize winner, Rabindranath Tagore stands among the greatest of Asiatic poets of all time. William Butler Yeats says that this 19th century writer "like Chaucer's Forerunners, writes music for his words and (that he) is so abundant, so spontaneous, so daring in his passon, and so full of surprise". John Alden Carpenter, the noted American composer, has set several of these beautiful lyrics to music.