Vidyapati was born in the village Bisfi^[6] in Madhubani district of Mithila region of Bihar, India,^[7] and died in Samastipur. He was the son of shri Ganapati Thakur. The name Vidyapati is derived from two Sanskrit words, vidya ("knowledge") and pati ("master"), connoting thereby "a man of knowledge".

Love songs

Vidyapati, mainly known for his love songs and prayers for Shiva,

• All My Inhibition

All my inhibition left me in a flash,
When he robbed me of my clothes,
But his body became my new dress.
Like a bee hovering on a lotus leaf
He was there in my night, on me!^[8]

Other works

Vidyapati also wrote on other topics including ethics, history, geography, and law. His works include:

• Puru?a Par?k?? deals with moral teachings.Recently Publications Division of Government of India has brought out the Hindi Translation of Purusha Pariksha by Akhilesh Jha. There are 25 stories in the book selected from 44 stories in the original work. Besides, there are scholarly introductions to both Vidyapati and Purusha Pariksha in the book.
• Likhanabali is about writing
• Bhu-Parikrama, literal meaning, around the world, is about local geography
• Vibh?gas?ra is autobiographical in nature
• D?nav?ky?val? is about charity
• Gang?v?ky?val?
• Var?ak?tya
• Durg?bhaktitara?gi??
• ?aivasarvasvah?ra
• K?rttipat?k?
• K?rttilat?

The influence of the lyrics of Vidyapati on the love of Radha and Krishna on the Bengali poets of the medieval period was so overwhelming that they largely imitated it. As a result, an artificial literary language, known as Brajabuli was developed in the sixteenth century. Brajabuli is basically Maithili (as prevalent during the medieval period) but its forms are modified to look like Bengali.^[9] The medieval Bengali poets, Gobindadas Kabiraj, Jnandas, Balaramdas and Narottamdas composed their padas (poems) in this language. Rabindranath Tagore composed his Bhanusingha Thakurer Padabali (1884) in a mix of Western Hindi (Braj Bhasha) and archaic Bengali and named the language Brajabuli as an imitation of Vidyapati (he initially promoted these lyrics as those of a newly discovered poet, Bhanusingha). Other 19th-century figures in the Bengal Renaissance like Bankim Chandra Chatterjee have also written in Brajabuli.

Tagore was much influenced by Vidyapati. He set the poet's Bhara Badara to his own tune.

Vidyapati's influence reached Odisha through Bengal. The earliest composition in Brajabuli is ascribed to Ramananda Raya, the governor of Godavari province of the King of Odisha, Gajapati Prataprudra Dev. He was a disciple of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. He recited his Brajabuli poems to Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, when he first met him on the bank of river Godavari at Rajahmundry, southern provincial capital of Kingdom of Odisha in 1511–12. Other notable Odia poets influenced by Vidyapati's poems were Champati Ray and king Pratap Malla Dev (1504–32).

Pahari Sanyal played the role of Vidyapati in the 1937 film Vidyapati, which received a lot of appreciation. The film starred Prithviraj Kapoor as King Shiva Singha of Mithila.^[10]

• Coomaraswamy, Anand, ed. (1915), VIDY?PATI: BANG?YA PAD?BALI (PDF), London: The Old Bourne Press 

• Archer, W. G., ed. (1963), Love Songs of Vidyapati; Tr. by Deben Bhattacharya, London: George Allen and Unwyn