Mir Taqi Mir

Mir Taqi Mir (1723-1810) is called Khuda-e-sukhan, the god of poetry, and is the writer against whom later Urdu poets measured themselves — Ghalib said that reading Mir made him want to give up. He lived through the sacking of Delhi, fled to Lucknow, and wrote six divans in a plain, wounded register very different from the ornament around him. His corpus is enormous and only partly digitised, which is why misattribution is common. Every couplet here is checked against his collected work on Urdu Wikisource, with Devanagari transliteration and English translation.