The Tuhfa-yi Sami and Canon Formation in Persian Poetry

The Tuhfa-yi Sami, a biographical dictionary of Persian poets (i.e. tazkira) written around 1550 CE, is an unusual document on a number of levels. It was compiled and written not by a professional poet, nor by a learned court official, but rather by a Safavid prince named Sam Mirza, one of the brothers of Shah Tahmasp. My research into the career of Sam Mirza reveals that he wrote the Tuhfa-yi Sami while living in Ardabil in the late 1540s and early 1550s. (The implication is that he was there under house arrest, due to his history of disloyalty to Tahmasp, as well as the rebellion of their other brother Alqas Mirza.) This is a tazkira written by a member of the ruling house, apparently as a self-financed project and with no commissioned requirements as to its content or form. What we find is that Sam Mirza was concerned not with writing a new comprehensive history of the practitioners of Persian poetry, but rather with collecting information about people who were composing verse during (or shortly before) his lifetime. A further unusual aspect of the Tuhfa-yi Sami is that it contains notices on many individuals who wrote poetry, but not for a living – and in fact a number of them are mentioned as practicing humble trades. What I intend to argue, above all, is that the Tuhfa-yi Sami hints at a post-canonical moment in Persian poetry. Sam Mirza, free to write whatever kind of tazkira he likes, goes back no further than the mid-15th century CE. He appears especially under the influence of such figures as ‘Abd al-Rahman Jami, Dawlatshah Samarqandi, and Mir ‘Ali Shir Nava’i, and his tazkira gives the impression that the Persian poetic tradition had been crystallized in late Timurid Herat. There are also points in the Tuhfa-yi Sami at which the author makes almost open reference to the conventional nature of verse. With all of this in mind, we can look at this tazkira as an important source on the process of canon formation in Persian poetry. It may also provide us with new insight on the literary innovations that were already taking place during Sam Mirza’s life, and which would go much further throughout the Safavid-Mughal era.