Bengali poetry is a form that originated in Pāli and other Prakrit socio-cultural traditions. It is antagonistic towards Vedic rituals and laws as opposed to the shramanic traditions such as Buddhism and Jainism. However, modern Bengali owes much to Sanskrit.

The history of Bengali poetry underwent three successive stages of development: poetry of the early age (like Charyapad), the Medieval period and the age of modern poetry. Modernity was introduced into Bengali poetry in the 1930s.

Bengali poetry probably began during the 10th century. It is known for the mystic poems called Charyacharyavinishchaya, and sometimes called Charyapad or Charyagiti. These poems were discovered in Nepal's Royal Library by Bengali scholar Mahamahopadhyay Haraprasad Shastri.

The Medieval period of Bengali poetry was between 1350 and 1800. It was known as the period of Jayadeva, the renowned 12th century poet from neighboring Orissa who was famous for his poem Gitagovinda.

Other noted poets from this period include 13th century Vidyapati, known for his love lyrics and Baḍu, Chandidas, writer of Sri Krishna Kirtan. Sri Krishna Kirtan is considered to be the most important philosophical and erotic work of the period.

Rabindranath Tagore (Bengali: রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর; 7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941), sobriquet Gurudev, was a Bengali polymath who reshaped his region's literature and music. Author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. In translation his poetry was viewed as spiritual and mercurial; his seemingly mesmeric personality, flowing hair, and other-worldly dress earned him a prophet-like reputation in the West. His "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal. Tagore introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial language into Bengali literature, thereby freeing it from traditional models based on classical Sanskrit. He was highly influential in introducing the best of Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and he is generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of modern India.

A Pirali Brahmin from Calcutta, Tagore wrote poetry as an eight-year-old. At age sixteen, he released his first substantial poems under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha ("Sun Lion"), which were seized upon by literary authorities as long-lost classics. He graduated to his first short stories and dramas—and the aegis of his birth name—by 1877. As a humanist, universalist internationalist, and strident anti-nationalist he denounced the Raj and advocated independence from Britain. As an exponent of the Bengal Renaissance, he advanced a vast canon that comprised paintings, sketches and doodles, hundreds of texts, and some two thousand songs; his legacy endures also in the institution he founded, Visva-Bharati University.