"Gitanjali, " or Song Offerings, is a collection of poems translated by the author, Rabindranath Tagore, from the original Bengali. This collection won Tagore the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. He was the first Asian to win the honour. These poems are primarily devotional, with mystic aura and sublimated ecstasy. They are the thoughts of a seer; the perfect union of beauty and truth in poetry from the pen of the greatest poet of modern India. While introducing this small volume to the West, W. B. Yeats wrote: "Though the work of a supreme culture, they yet appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes. A tradition, where poetry and religion are the same thing, has passed through the centuries, gathering from learned and unlearned metaphor and emotion and carried back again to the multitude the thought of the scholar and of the noble. "