Essays on Nima Yushij: Animating Modernism in Persian Poetry

Through several groundbreaking critical articles on the question of poetic modernity in Persian new verse, this book focuses on the life and works of Nima Yushij (1887-1960), a major modernist Iranian poet. The articles situate Nima’s life firmly within the context of early 20th century Iranian history. They are framed by a brief introduction in which the various contributions are related to each other and to various trends in poetic modernism in the Persian language, and a bibliography that lists all of Nima’s works and the major studies of his life and work, both in Persian and in various Western languages. The book fills a gap in the history of Persian literature that has long endured due to the resistance of such a tradition-bound culture to the modernization of its poetry.