The supreme poet and dramatist of classical Sanskrit, conventionally placed in the Gupta golden age of the fourth and fifth centuries CE, about whose life almost nothing certain is known — yet whose grace of language, beauty of simile, and fusion of human longing with the natural world set the standard for Indian literature ever after, and whose play The Recognition of Shakuntala, in its first European translation, astonished Goethe and the readers of the late eighteenth century.
Around 1789, a German poet encountered a new European translation of a Sanskrit play more than a thousand years old, and was overwhelmed. Goethe praised it in a short verse, saying that if you wanted heaven and earth named in a single word, you would say its title: Shakuntala. The play told a quiet love story of a king and a hermitage girl, and it had been written in distant India by a poet named Kalidasa. About that poet almost nothing is known. We have no reliable date for his birth, no city we can name with confidence, no certain account of his life. What survives is the work, and the work was enough to make him the standard against which Sanskrit poetry has been measured ever since.