The essays included in Clio Revisits Calliope: A Historian's Excursion to the Kāvya Literature analyze kāvya literature in Sanskrit, bringing to bear on it a sense of history. Taken up for study are the kāvyas of Kālidāsa, Bhāravi and Māgha, as well as a few praśastis. There is also a study of the Maṇipravāḷam poetry from Kerala, which partake of all features of Sanskrit kāvyas. The burden of argument in these essays is that even when the theme taken up by two texts are the same, each has a different flavour and character and that it is the social formation which produced a literary piece that determines them.