नेपाली कविहरू। यो पृष्ठमा आदिकवि भानुभक्त आचार्यदेखि समकालीन कविसम्म नेपाली कविताका प्रमुख कविहरूको परिचय छ। भानुभक्त आचार्यदेखि मनु मन्जिलसम्म सत्र जना कविको छुट्टाछुट्टै पृष्ठ छ, जसमा परिचय, जीवनी, प्रमुख कृतिहरू र साहित्यिक योगदान दिइएको छ। हरेक मिति र कृतिको नाम स्रोतसँग जाँचिएको छ, र स्रोतहरू नमिल्दा त्यो पनि लेखिएको छ।
These are profiles of seventeen Nepali poets, from the 1800s to today, 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 they fit together
Bhanubhakta Acharya establishes that Nepali is adequate to serious subject matter, and Motiram Bhatta prints him, writes his life and brings in the ghazal. Yogmaya Neupane composes aloud against the Rana state and is written down by others. Lekhnath Paudyal shows what the classical metres can do at their best. Devkota takes the language further and argues, by choosing a folk metre for a story about migration, that ordinary life is itself the serious subject.
Balkrishna Sama gives Nepali a modern theatre. Siddhicharan Shrestha goes to jail for his Romantic, anti-Rana verse, and Madhav Prasad Ghimire writes the great elegy Gauri. Gopal Prasad Rimal is the first to break with metre, and Bhupi Sherchan takes that break furthest, finding out what a poem is without it. Mohan Koirala and Bairagi Kainla push towards experiment. Parijat, writing at the same time, turns away from the collective subject entirely and towards one interior. Banira Giri, Abhi Subedi, Kumar Nagarkoti and Manu Manjil carry the story to the present.
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.
Nepali poets and their titles (कविहरूका उपाधि)
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.