From Nima Yushij to Sohrab Sepehri: A Development of Modern Persian Poetry

In the first half of the 20th century, Nima developed an early form of modern Persian poetry with unequal lengths of lines and a different notion of rhyme. Nima developed a poetic form that was not symmetrical in its shape and music and was (partially) free from restrictions of rhyme and meter. At the same time Nima was theorizing a modern “politically-engaged” Persian poetry, Hushang Irani (1925–1973) deviated from Nima’s poetic modernism through developing a modern apolitical surrealistic Persian poetry. Irani’s poetry possessed (nonreligious) mysticism along with synesthesia and personification, leading to a particular kind of surrealism. Inheriting an unprecedented combination of characteristics from two pioneers of modern Persian poetry, Sohrab Sepehri’s contribution to Persian poetry is apolitical poetry in a modified Nimaic metrics whose mysticism goes beyond Sufism.