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Primary sourceSpeech1917

Personality

Rabindranath Tagore · 1917

A collection of Tagore's own lectures on art, self and society, delivered during his 1917 lecture tour in America.

These are Tagore's own lectures, directly expressing his philosophy of self and art.

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What it is

This is a volume of lectures written and delivered by Rabindranath Tagore in 1917, published as Personality. The text opens with a lecture titled "What is Art?" exploring how humans relate to the world through need, reason and personal feeling.

Why it matters

The lectures show Tagore not only as a poet but as a thinker who tried to explain his philosophy of self and society to Western audiences. They reveal how he used English prose to carry Bengali and universal ideas across cultures in the early twentieth century.

Look closer

  • Why might Tagore have chosen to explain his ideas through lectures rather than poems?
  • What does his discussion of art and personality tell you about how he saw the relationship between people and the world?
  • What is left out of a philosophical lecture that a diary or letter might show instead?

This speech is part of the curated material that grounds the AI version of Rabindranath Tagore on Humy.ai — when students ask about related events, the AI can quote it and cite it.

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Rabindranath Tagore · 11 December 1911

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