Mir Taqi Mir was the first of the great poets of Urdu. He was also the most prolific. His works include more than 13,500 couplets, made up of more than 27,000 lines of poetry. His poems span many traditional genres, including rubaiyat (quatrains), masnavi (long rhymed narratives), qasida (lyric odes), and the ghazal. However, most of his poems are ghazals. He is regarded as the master of the Urdu ghazal. His distinctive style and language, blending Persian poetics with ordinary Urdu created a pattern of Urdu ghazal that has been imitated by subsequent generations of poets. All great Urdu poets have paid homage to Mir in their work, including Urdu's greatest poet, Ghalib.
