Classical Persian Poetry and Poets: the Timurid and Turkmen Periods

1 October 2012 - 30 June 2013

Funding awarded: £ 22,567

Sponsor(s): Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)

Project webpage(s)

Classical Persian Poetry and Poets: the Timurid and Turkmen Periods

About the research

The project aims to provide a comprehensive survey of the life, works and thought of all major and some of the minor poets who flourished during in the late Mongol, Timurid and Türkmen periods. At present, there exists no in-depth study, and certainly no comprehensive up-to-date historical survey of Persian poetry during these two centuries (roughly the 14th-15th centuries) when most the models of classical Persian poetry were perfected, and during which many major Persian poets flourished. The main focus of the project will be a monograph focusing on several themes found in these poets:

- The intertextual relationship of the poets to contemporaries and predecessors
- Sufi terminology and symbolism in their works
- Bachannalian and wine symbolism
- Poetic Genres and their typology
- The ‘Indian Style’ (Sabk-i Hindi) and the ‘Realist School’ (Maktab-i Voqu’) movements and the poets of the Timurid and Türkmen Periods,
- Eroticism and doctrines of love, both profane and sacred
- The influence of Ibn ‘Arabi’s (d. 1240) theomonism on Persian poetry of the period
- The political-historical background and socio-cultural milieu of poetry during the period