This dissertation is a literary study of the voices of some of the better known, yet leaststudied, Sanskrit poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Tamil South. I argue that the circles of Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita and his student, Rāmabhadra Dīkṣita, are characterized by a unique and shared literary style that reflects intimate connections between poets and readers. I show that these authors wrote themselves into their works in marked, yet deliberately oblique, ways. Their voices allow the modern scholar of premodern India to glimpse what it means to be a person who sees himself as part of the Sanskrit cosmopolis, long after Sanskrit itself had ceased to be the exclusive idiom of political and cultural expression in the subcontinent, and centuries after thriving multilingual literary spheres came to be established in various parts of the subcontinent. The weight of the authoritative Sanskrit tradition of writing is far from being a burden for these authors: they write as if Sanskrit poetry can only get better, and its canon of luminaries can continue to expand. I call these authors’ mode of authorship “intimately cosmopolitan”: they feel at home in the Sanskrit tradition, which is in turn experienced in their small Brahmin villages and transmitted through their beloved teachers, family members, and students. They seek to embody the entirety of a vast Sanskrit corpus in all disciplines, and simultaneously present themselves through the gurus and immediate family members with whom they shared their lives. These clashing scales, of centuries-old Sanskrit knowledge systems alongside their intimate worlds of the classroom or village home, brought these authors to celebrate and experiment with the range at their disposal, rather than lament their place and time. Much of their literary endeavors can be read against these contrastive scales. This corpus of literature, rarely read in academic contexts for its literary value or content, is nevertheless unique. It conveys an attitude toward tradition that is neither traditionalist nor revolutionary: it is rather a consistent attempt to master the vast tradition of Sanskrit letters by playing with it, with deep respect yet with a notable lack of reverence, from within. It presents a densely intertextual and self-referential vision of poetry, accompanied by a double voice and hybridity of register. Writing within an intimately cosmopolitan milieu also entails that these authors’ self-insertions are deeply collective: they are orchestrated through intricate intertexts from the Sanskrit tradition of knowledge and literature, and further include their intimate genealogical ties with their teachers and kin (who were often the same), as well as their personal God or Goddess, whom they are often said to embody. Through these signature techniques, we can sense and analyze their senses of authorship and formations of self. These convey a heightened singularity, yet they are never in the singular: they are interwoven with the people, gods, and traditions that these authors took to be significant. Their work was not designed to travel wide, but it was premised on the sustainment of intimate genealogical networks. That these poets have a role in our received understandings of the history of Sanskrit poetry is largely the result of this genealogical logic: the prominent modern scholars Kuppuswami Sastri and his student V. Raghavan were direct descendants of these poets’ emphasized networks of students and kin. Throughout the dissertation, I pose and nuance questions regarding the broad epistemic, cultural, and economic models that inform this corpus of literature. These shed light on the role of hereditary capital in intellectual households in tax-exempt Brahmin villages in the Tamil heartland, on the particular relationship of Sanskrit literature with multilingual cultural production at the nearby court of Thanjavur and in the Tamil-speaking South, and on the role of Sanskrit knowledge, and particularly of Sanskrit poetry, in the lives of these influential early modern Sanskrit poets. In the thesis, I attempt to do justice to these authors’ largely forgotten, yet remarkable literary programs and ambitions, and to situate their work in the larger stories of Sanskrit literature and cultural production in the early modern period in South India.