Though Simin Behbahani's poems differ in their command of language, versatility of themes, and originality of images, they are unified from beginning to end by common traits. This poet has consistently been an advocate of individual rights, regardless of gender, class, religion, political affiliation, or ethnicity. She has transformed a conventional and mainly masculine poetic form—the ghazal. With her skillful mastery of poetic devices and techniques, she has integrated a classical genre with a modern vision, blending the old and the new, the masculine and the feminine. She has brought together the discourses of modernity and tradition, which, rather than competing in her work, complement, restructure and reconstruct each other. Hers is high art with popular appeal. This is all the more remarkable because Behbahani's adherence to the prosodic rules of the classical ghazal, her multifaceted outlook, her repeated allusions to prophets, philosophers, writers, literary characters, make great demands on her readers.

This article analyzes Behbahani's narrative and poetic works as they reflect different sociopolitical discourses over decades and discusses her contribution to the rise of new literary discourses in different periods. These discourses reflect the pre-Revolutionary committed and post-Revolutionary feminist literary movements and, in recent years, an emerging trend toward expression of the cultural exigencies of modernity. This new development results from efforts for renewed literary modernity, in which feminist, reformist, and civil society movements find common ground for concern. Behbahani's poem, “I Will Rebuild You, Oh My Homeland,” is analyzed to show that recent re-readings and public performances of this older piece may signify a literary shift regarding issues of modernity.

This article addresses an important, usually neglected, aspect of the work of Simin Behbahani, namely her prose and fiction, mostly autobiographical writings, which should be indispensable to an understanding of her poetry. While Behbahni views her poetry to be about life in general and says that she utilizes the language of the people to compose her poems, she also finds prose a more appropriate form for writing on certain topics. With an examination of a number of her prose writings, including “An Mard, Mard-e Hamraham” [“That Man, My Companion”], “Ba Qalb-e Khod Cheh Kharidam” [“What I Bought with My Heart”], and “Kelid-o Khanjar” [“Key and Dagger”], the article explores the poet as a storyteller and the link between her poetry and fictional prose, especially in terms of her life story.

From the beginning of her career, Simin Behbahani stresses her intention to reflect contemporary concerns in her poetry. She has continued to use the traditional form of ghazal and to affirm the ghazal's capacity to reflect the contemporary environment. Behbahani tells us how she changed the structure of the ghazal to suit her poetic needs. This paper focuses on the poetic conversation as a feature of Behbahani's poetic style which leads her poetry firmly into present time. Early female poets in Iran made use of poetic conversation to bring attention to a changing social system and, especially, issues of concern to women. Behbahani refines and perfects the technique of poetic conversation. Her poetic conversations range from a single-voiced complaint to complex commentary involving more than one perspective. In particular, a character identified only as “you” at times represents society or a companion, and may even bring the poet face-to-face with herself. This character widens the scope of the poetic drama. Behbahani's poetic conversations convey a femininity that is complex and a sensibility that is modern.

This paper is a phenomenological study of one of Simin Behbahani's better known poems, “Raqqaseh,” which is about the nightly ritualized dance of a dancing girl in a tavern. It will argue that the tavern in this poem could be viewed as a cultural container for socially dangerous representations and impulses, like the metaphoric sexualized body of the dancing girl. The tavern could also be viewed as a semiotic register for the symbolic representation of the dominant normative social discourse. By viewing the dance as performance, the communicative association of the symbolic significance of the dancing girl's body and the tavern and its audience will also be discussed. This paper will argue that the reader too is implicated in the performative function of the text.

Although considered a ‘modern’ poet, unlike most of her contemporaries (e.g. Ahmad Shamlou, Mehdi Akhavan-e Sales, and Nader Naderpour), Simin Behbahani, has, on the whole, avoided the free verse forms of shi‘r-i nu and has chosen to employ the most popular classical genre of Persian lyric poetry, the ghazal, as the chief vehicle for her poetic expression. Behbahani has been praised by many literary critics for her use of innovative metric schemes, especially from the mid-1970s onwards, and she is perhaps one of the first Persian poets since the medieval period to do so with any success. This article, however, will focus on features other than meter (such as imagery, language, and structure) to examine how innovative or traditional Behbahani's ghazals are in these respects. There is a tangible tension between the old and the new in Behbahani's ghazals, which has yet to be fully explored. After a broader discussion of how Behbahani has reworked the classical ghazal and how her remolding of this traditional genre has been received by literary critics, I will examine two poems from her 1973 collection Rastakhiz [Resurrection] in order to demonstrate how the poet blends the old with the new in her ghazals.