Indian English poetry is the oldest form ofIndian English literature.Henry Louis Vivian Derozio is considered the first poet in the lineage of Indian English poetry followed byRabindranath Tagore,Sri Aurobindo,Sarojini Naidu,Michael Madhusudan Dutt, andToru 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 areToru Dutt,Michael Madhusudan Dutt,Sarojini Naidu,Sri Aurobindo andRabindranath Tagore. Some of the notable poets of Ezekiel's time areA. K. Ramanujan,R. Parthasarathy,Gieve Patel,Jayant Mahapatra,Dom Moraes,Kamala Das,Keki N. Daruwalla, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra,Shiv K. Kumar,Arun Kolatkar andDilip 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.
If Indian poets in English are less well known abroad than the novelists it is probably because their concerns are personal, local and yet universal; they do not write, at least not directly about the nationalist and postcolonial political and cultural themes that the West patronizingly expects, even demands, from the formerly colonized.
Other notable 20th century poets of English poetry in India includeEunice De Souza,Gieve Patel,Kersy Katrak andP. Lal among others. The younger generation of poets writing in English areAbhay K,Adil Jussawalla,A. J. Thomas,Anju Makhija,Anjum Hasan,Arundhathi Subramaniam,Hoshang Merchant,Madan Gopal Gandhi,Bibhu Padhi,C. P. Surendran,Dileep Jhaveri,Gopi Kottoor,Jayanta Mahapatra,Jeet Thayil,Jerry Pinto,Urvashi Bahuguna,K Srilata,K. V. Dominic,D. C. Chambial,T. Vasudeva Reddy,Makarand Paranjape,Akhil Katyal,Aditya Tiwari,Mani Rao,Meena Kandasamy,Menka Shivdasani,Manohar Shetty,Priya Sarukkai Chabria,Sharanya Manivannan,Ranjit Hoskote,Jaydeep Sarangi,Robin Ngangom,Rukmini Bhaya Nair,S. Anand,Salik Shah,Sudeep Sen,Sukrita Paul Kumar,Nalini Priyadarshni,Vijay Nambisan,Syam Sudhakar,Vihang A. Naik,Tapan Kumar Pradhan,Amitabh Mitra andYuyutsu Sharma among others.
Modern expatriate Indian poets writing in English includeMeena Alexander,Ravi Shankar,Sujata Bhatt,Tabish Khair,Vikram Seth andVijay Seshadri among others
Notable anthologies of Indian English poetry includeTen Twentieth-Century Indian Poets (edited byR. Parthasarathy),Three Indian Poets:Nissim Ezekiel,A K Ramanujan,Dom Moraes (edited by Bruce Alvin King),The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra), 'Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets (edited by Ranjit Hoskote),60 Indian Poets (edited byJeet Thayil),HarperCollins Anthology of English Poetry (edited bySudeep Sen), Voices Now World Poetry Today (Edited by Binay Laha &B. K. Sorkar),Anthology of Contemporary Indian Poetry (edited by Menka Shivdasani,[1][2] published byMichael Rothenberg in 2004);Ten: The New Indian Poets (edited and selected byJayanta Mahapatra andYuyutsu Sharma, New Delhi/Jaipur: Nirala Publications).[3]