Meer Taqi Meer

Mir Taqi Mir(b. 1723 - d. 1810), whose original name was Mohammed Taqi and takhallus was Mir was the leading Urdu poet of the eighteenth century, and one of the pioneers who gave shape to the Urdu language itself. He was one of the principal poets of the Delhi school of the Urdu ghazal and remains arguably the foremost name in Urdu poetry often remembered as Khuda-e-Sukhan meaning God of verse.

He was born in Agra, India (called "Akbarabad" at the time), which at the time was ruled by the Mughals, in 1723. He left for Delhi, at the age of 11, following his father's death. His philosophy of life was formed primarily from his father, whose emphasis on the importance of love and the value of compassion remained with him through his life and imbued his poetry. At Delhi, he finished his education and joined a group of nobility as a courtier-poet. He lived much of his life in Mughal Delhi. However, after Ahmad Shah Abdali's sack of Delhi each year starting 1748, he eventually moved to the court of Asaf-ud-Daulah in Lucknow, at the king's invitation. Distressed to witness the plundering of his beloved Delhi, he gave vent to his feelings through some of his couplets. He remained in Lucknow for the remainder of his life.

Mir's literary reputation is anchored on his ghazals. Mir lived at a time when Urdu language and poetry was at a formative stage - and Mir's instinctive aesthetic sense helped him strike a balance between the indigenous expression and new enrichments coming in from Persian imagery and idiom, to constitute the new elite language known as Rekhta or Hindui. Basing his language on his native Hindustani, he leavened it with a sprinkling of Persian diction and phraseology, and created a poetic language at once simple, natural and elegant, which was to guide generations of future poets.

After his move to Lucknow, his beloved daughter died, followed by his son, and then his wife. This, together with other earlier setbacks (including his traumatic stages in Delhi) lends a strong pathos to much of his writing - and indeed Mir is noted for his poetry of pathos and melancholy.
Mir made no secret of his attachments to young louts, and wrote of his passing fancy for Attar Ka Launda the son of a perfumer and Memar Ka Larka son of a mason.

While some historians have read into Mir's verse his own feelings and experiences, whether that be love for boys or love for women, others hold that "Such contradictory visions of Mir's life and times arise from the effort to extract from Mir's ghazals information that they simply do not contain."

What Mir was practicing was probably the Malamati or Blameworthy aspect of the Sufi tradition. Using this technique, a person ascribes to oneself an unconventional aspect of a person or society, and then plays out its results, either in action or in verse.
Mir was a prolific writer. His complete works, Kulliaat, consist of 6 dewans, containing 13,585 couplets comprising all kinds of poetic forms: ghazal, masnavi, qasida, rubai, mustezaad, satire, etc.
Mir's famous contemporary, also an Urdu poet of no inconsiderable repute, was Mirza Rafi Sauda.
He died in Lucknow, of a purgative overdose, on 20 September 1810.