2 - Life Imitating Art: The Thirty-year Poetic History

Summary

Poetry arises from life and is the fruit of life. But it is certainly not the outcome of our feelings, although it might be connected to our feelings and select our feelings or impressions.

Nima Yushij (1945)

We had all the words of the world at our disposal and

we did not say

that which would be of use

Because there was one word

only one word that was missing:

– freedom!

We did not say it.

You visualise it!

Ahmad Shamlu (1972)

Poetry-loving Persian speakers from my generation are fortunate to have within their collective memory the relayed yet tangible experience of modern Persian poetry's advent – the historic break from the ageold, captivating and rich tradition, over a millennium long, of classical Persian poetry. This ground-breaking feat was championed by Nima Yushij (Ali Esfandiyari; 1897–1959) and his she‘r-e no (New Poetry, or modern poetry). Yushij and his (often forgotten) predecessors and contemporaries on the path of poetry modernisation relentlessly campaigned to ‘release’ Persian poetry from the classical metrics, structures and imagery that these vanguards regarded as imposed limitations on their expressing their shifting realities in a rapidly modernising country (Akhavan-Sales 1990; Ariyanpour 1988; Karimi-Hakkak 1995; Naficy 1997; Talattof 2000). Although it resulted from a collective endeavour, the eventual and vigorous entrance of Iran's poetic modernity, in the face of resistances from defenders of the tradition, is undoubtedly tied to Nima Yushij. History has its own curious logic.

Yushij's unwavering commitment to poetic modernity, expressed in his works and those of contemporary or subsequent generations deeply influenced by him, was a part of an era's Zeitgeist following the Constitutional Revolution (1906–11) – a period that marked the beginning of the long, painful and interwoven process of solidifying Iranian modernity through the authoritarian Pahlavi state. This Zeitgeist was also registered through the then-emerging modern Persian fiction, advocated by several contemporaries of Yushij, which intrigued Nima as a literary movement braided with his New Poetry. In the realm of literature as well as in the cultural milieu, a revolutionary spirit was in the air in the early-to-mid-twentieth century. The poetic style of she‘r-e no that Yushij founded was collectively named after him: she‘r-e Nima’i or Nimaic poetry. The naming of phenomena, events and styles is never innocent, and in the case of Nimaic poetry, we will see why.