See A. A. Macdonell, _Vedic Mythology_ (Strassburg, 1897).
KALIDASA, the most illustrious name among the writers of the second epoch of Sanskrit literature, which, as contrasted with the age of the Vedic hymns, may be characterized as the period of artificial poetry. Owing to the absence of the historical sense in the Hindu race, it is impossible to fix with chronological exactness the lifetime of either Kalidasa or any other Sanskrit author. Native tradition places him in the 1st century B.C.; but the evidence on which this belief rests is worthless. The works of the poet contain no allusions by which their date can be directly determined; yet the extremely corrupt form of the Prakrit or popular dialects spoken by the women and the subordinate characters in his plays, as compared with the Prakrit in inscriptions of ascertained age, led such authorities as Weber and Lassen to agree in fixing on the 3rd century A.D. as the approximate period to which the writings of Kalidasa should be referred.
He was one of the "nine gems" at the court of King Vikramaditya or Vikrama, at Ujjain, and the tendency is now to regard the latter as having flourished about A.D. 375; others, however, place him as late as the 6th century. The richness of his creative fancy, his delicacy of sentiment, and his keen appreciation of the beauties of nature, combined with remarkable powers of description, place Kalidasa in the first rank of Oriental poets. The effect, however, of his productions as a whole is greatly marred by extreme artificiality of diction, which, though to a less extent than in other Hindu poets, not unfrequently takes the form of puerile conceits and plays on words. In this respect his writings contrast very unfavourably with the more genuine poetry of the Vedas. Though a true poet, he is wanting in that artistic sense of proportion so characteristic of the Greek mind, which exactly adjusts the parts to the whole, and combines form and matter into an inseparable poetic unity. Kalidasa's fame rests chiefly on his dramas, but he is also distinguished as an epic and a lyric poet.
He wrote three plays, the plots of which all bear a general resemblance, inasmuch as they consist of love intrigues, which, after numerous and seemingly insurmountable impediments of a similar nature, are ultimately brought to a successful conclusion.