गोपालप्रसाद रिमाल (सन् १९१७ वा १९१८–१९७३) लाई छन्द त्यागेर नेपाली कवितामा क्रान्तिकारी स्वर ल्याउने पहिलो कवि मानिन्छ। आमाको सपना कविता सङ्ग्रहका लागि उनले मदन पुरस्कार पाए र मसान नाटक लेखे। यो लेख रिमालको परिचय, जीवनी र मुक्त छन्दको सुरुवातबारे हो।
Ask who freed Nepali poetry from metre and most readers will say Bhupi Sherchan. Bhupi is the poet who made free verse feel inevitable. But he was not the first to break the line, and the poet who was is worth knowing for more than the date.
The facts
Gopal Prasad Rimal was born in Kathmandu in 1917 or 1918 (sources differ; Nepali sources give Jeth 1975 BS) and died on 24 October 1973. His first poem appeared in the magazine Sharada.
He was a political activist as well as a poet. He founded the Praja Panchayat to oppose Rana rule and was jailed several times.
His collection Aamako Sapana (आमाको सपना), "Mother's Dream", won the Madan Puraskar. He also wrote plays, including Masan (मसान), "The Cremation Ground", and Yo Prem (यो प्रेम), "This Love". He received the Tribhuvan Puraskar in 1973.
The scholar of Nepali literature Michael Hutt calls him the first "revolutionary" Nepali poet and the first to reject the use of metre. Nepali sources describe the same move as mukta chhanda (मुक्त छन्द), free verse.
His work is out of copyright.
Why the first break matters
When Lekhnath was the standard, metre was not just a technique. It was what made a piece of writing count as a poem. Dropping it was a claim that a poem is defined by what it does, not by the pattern it obeys.
Rimal made that claim while doing something dangerous: writing against the Rana state. That is not a coincidence. A regular metre makes almost anything sound settled and resolved. A poet who wanted to unsettle a reader, to say that the country was not as it claimed to be, had good reason to want a form that did not resolve so comfortably. I make the longer version of that argument in why modern Nepali poetry stopped rhyming.
A dramatist too
Masan is studied as a play in its own right. Writing plays and poems at once is a useful habit for any poet: drama teaches you that every line is spoken by someone, to someone, for a reason.
What a working poet takes from him
Breaking a form is a statement. When you drop a convention, the reader notices the absence. Make sure the poem gives them a reason for it.
Know whose line you are continuing. Free verse in Nepali did not begin with the poets we now associate with it. I write in free verse; it helps to know it was won by someone, at some cost.
Where to go next
Bhupi Sherchan is the poet who took his break further. Devkota is his near-contemporary, and the movements piece shows what came after. All the poets are on the Nepali poets page.