These are profiles of four Nepali poets, written by a working poet rather than an encyclopaedia. Wikipedia will give you the dates and the bibliography, and it will do that better than I can. What it will not tell you is what the poems are doing — why a metre was chosen, what a line break is carrying, what a poet gave up in order to write the way they did.
That is what these pages are for. Every date, award and title has been checked against a source. Everything else is a reading, and it is mine, which means you are free to disagree with it.
They are best read in order, because each poet is arguing with the one before.
How these four fit together
Bhanubhakta Acharya establishes that Nepali is adequate to serious subject matter. Devkota takes that further and argues, by choosing a folk metre for a story about migration, that ordinary life is itself the serious subject. Bhupi Sherchan removes the metre and finds out what a poem is without it. Parijat, writing at the same time, turns away from the collective subject entirely and towards one interior.
Around them, three organised movements were forming under censorship and reaching incompatible conclusions about how poetry survives a state that reads it. That is covered separately in Three Ways Out.
On what is missing
Four poets is not a canon and this page does not pretend to be one. Lekhnath Paudyal, Gopal Prasad Rimal, Siddhicharan Shrestha, Balkrishna Sama, Madhav Prasad Ghimire, Bairagi Kainla, Mohan Koirala, Banira Giri, Hari Bhakta Katuwal and many others belong in any real account of Nepali poetry.
They are absent because I have not yet done the reading and the verification that writing about a real person properly requires. I would rather publish four profiles I can stand behind than fourteen assembled from other people's summaries. More will be added as they are written.
Read the poems
If you came here to read poetry rather than about it, the Nepali poems page has my own work, and the literature section has the short stories as well. I write in Nepali, mostly short and mostly unresolved, and the poets above are a large part of the reason why.