Caitanya-caritāmṛta-mahākāvya

A Sanskrit poem in twenty cantos on the life of Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu — the earliest of its full-length biographies. Its author, Kavi Karṇapūra (b. 1524), was the son of Śivānanda Sena, one of Mahāprabhu's associates; he saw Mahāprabhu himself as a child and heard the rest from eyewitnesses. The poem opens with the lament of those left behind after the Lord's disappearance and then tells the story from his birth in Navadvīpa through his student years, his turning, his sannyāsa and travels, to the last years in Purī. The same author later retold these events as the drama Caitanya-candrodaya. The reading unit is the verse, numbered by canto and verse.