Indian English Poetry

Indian English Poetry is the oldest form of Indian English Literature. Indian poets writing in English have succeeded to nativize or indianize English in order to reveal typical Indian situations.Henry Louis Vivian Derozio is considered the first poet in the lineage of Indian English poetry followed by Sri Aurobindo, Sarojini Naidu, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Toru Dutt among others.

Indian poetry in English has a longer and more distinguished tradition than Indian fiction in English.

Nissim Ezekiel is considered to be a pioneering figure in modern Indian English Poetry.His first book, A Time to Change, was published in 1952. The significant poets of the post-Derozio and pre-Ezekiel times are Toru Dutt, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Sarojini Naidu, Sri Aurobindo and Rabindranath Tagore. Some of the notable poets of Ezekiel's time are A. K. Ramanujan, R. Parthasarathy, Gieve Patel, Jayant Mahapatra, Dom Moraes, Kamala Das, Keki N. Daruwalla, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Shiv K. Kumar, Arun Kolatkar and Dilip Chitre. Rabindranath Tagore wrote primarily in Bengali and created a small body of work (mainly prose) in English and was responsible for the translations of his own work into English.