Ghalib was a renowned Urdu and Persian poet. Much of his life was spent in Delhi and he bore witness to the British conquest of the city in 1857. Ghalib wrote in the tradition of Hafiz and Rumi, but his poetry is distinctive: his spiritual struggles and the stark honesty with which he writes, speaks to a universal audience. The Lightening Should Have Fallen on Ghalib: Selected Poems of Ghalib is a collection of thirty ghazals, translated into English by Robert Bly and Sunil Dutta, demonstrating Ghalib's complete mastery of an elegant poetic form revered for centuries in the Muslim world.