Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a Bengali polymath, a poet, musician and artist from the Indian subcontinent. He reshaped Bengali literature and music, as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Tagore's poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his elegant prose and magical poetry remain largely unknown outside Bengal. Author of the "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse" of Gitanjali, he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.