HAFEZ

born 1325/26, Shiraz, Iran died 1389/90, Shiraz also spelled Hafiz, in full Mohammad Shams Od-din Hafez one of the finest lyric poets of Persia. Hafez received a classical religious education, lectured on Qur'anic and other theological subjects (Hafez designates one who has learned the Qur'an by heart), and wrote commentaries on religious classics. As a court poet he enjoyed the patronage of several rulers of Shiraz. About 136869 Hafez fell out of favour at the court and did not regain his position until 20 years later, just before his death. In his poetry there are many echoes of historical events as well as biographical descriptions and details of life in Shiraz. One of the guiding principles of his life was Sufism, the Islamic mystical movement that demanded of its adherents complete devotion to the pursuit of union with the ultimate reality. Hafez's principal verse form, one that he brought to a perfection never achieved before or since, was the ghazel, a lyric poem of 6 to 15 couplets linked by unity of subject and symbolism rather than by a logical sequence of ideas. Traditionally the ghazel had dealt with love and wine, motifs that, in their association with ecstasy and freedom from restraint, lent themselves naturally to the expression of Sufi ideas. Hafez's achievement was to give these conventional subjects a freshness and subtlety that completely relieves his poetry of tedious formalism. An important innovation credited to Hafez was the use of the ghazel instead of the qasida (ode) in panegyrics. Hafez also reduced the panegyric element of his poems to a mere one or two lines, leaving the remainder of the poem for his ideas. The extraordinary popularity of Hafez's poetry in all Persian-speaking lands stems from his simple and often colloquial though musical language, free from artificial virtuosity, and his unaffected use of homely images and proverbial expressions. Above all, his poetry is characterized by love of humanity, contempt for hypocrisy and mediocrity, and an ability to universalize everyday experience and to relate it to the mystic's unending search for union with God. His appeal in the West is indicated by the numerous translations of his poems. Hafez is most famous for his Divan; Eng. prose trans., H. Wilberforce Clarke, Hafiz Shirazi. The Divan (1891, reprinted 1971). There is also a translated collection: A.J. Arberry, Fifty Poems of Hafiz (1947).