Kalidasa for the 21st Century Reader: Selected Poetry and Drama

Kalidasa (circa fourth century CE) is widely regarded as the greatest poet and dramatist in the Sanskrit language. Not much is known with certainty about his life, and though many are aware of his timeless Sakuntalam and Meghadutam, very few have actually read him, even in translation. The aesthetics of poetry may have changed over 1500 years-we no longer compare women’s faces to lotuses or their figures to vines-but it is difficult not to be moved by the sheer beauty and lyricism of Kalidasa’s description of the exiled yak?a beseeching a cloud to carry his message across the mountains to his lover, or his evocative narration of the meeting of doomed lovers in the forest.