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Yaḥyā Dawlatābādī’s Contribution to Persian Poetic Modernity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Amr Taher Ahmed
Amr Taher Ahmed*
Affiliation:
Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University
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Abstract

In 1912, Yaḥyā Dawlatābādī composed two poems, the form of which diverged greatly from the canonical rules of tradition. Both poems were based on syllabic meters. Critics and historians of modern Persian literature have given these poems little consideration, and discussed them merely from the point of view of metrics. When compared to the great modernist endeavors in the poetry of the time, these pieces were judged severely, or altogether disavowed. This paper aims to show that, beyond mere metrical audacity, Yaḥyā Dawlatābādī’s syllabic poems were in fact innovative. As the article argues, they were born out of the same quest for fresh poetic forms that induced contemporaneous modernists to create new, individualized poetic patterns.

Keywords

Yaḥyā Dawlatābādīsyllabic poetryPersian poetryliterary modernity
Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 4 , July 2018 , pp. 557 - 586
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 2018

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