The carnivalesque poetics of the “rogue lyrics” (qalandariyyāt) medieval Sufi poetry have excited interest varied audiences since premodern times. This attention is not surprising: these poems' purported celebration proscribed actions, antinomian figures, and even apostasy shocks readers demands interpretation. Many interpreters, followed by a substantial group contemporary scholars, read image...

neo-classical sonnet, created out of iran’s classic poetry, is one of the contemporary poetic movements which have always been dynamic. the purpose of its leading poets was to make the traditional form of sonnet attuned with modern requirements. this poetic movement has benefited the poetic possibilities of which free verse has provided for persian poetry in terms of locution, language and lite...

contemporary arab poets have started to recall classic and especially religious figures in their poems to present experiences and ideologies, to rescue the poetry from reportage state and also to enhance their own poetry. the reason why they make use of these religious figures in their poetry is their potential implications and their compatibility with poet’s own current experiences. poets also...

emergence of any literary movement, whether poetry or prose, needs a suitable environment. appearance of epic among the greek and the iranian implies this fact that birth of each literary phenomenon is impossible in vaccum atmosphere, but they need special circumstances and means for their development and evolution. movement of free verse developing in arabic lands was in fact reaction to artis...

We apply topic modeling to classifying the genre of Ghazal, a form common in Persian poetry. We show that a classifier based on automatically-generated topics exposes important information with only a small performance penalty: the top discriminative topics can be manually aligned with themes prevalent in the associated genres, as identified by scholars of literature. We also weigh in on a long...