“Hâfezian Ghazals qua Poetry”

Writing on Hâfez since the early 1980s–commentaries, monographs, essays, encyclopaedia articles, and prefaces to translations–has added to the appreciation of Hâfez's ghazals, except arguably in one regard: the appreciation of those poems qua poetry. According to Websters Third International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged, “poetry...is writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through its meaning, sound, and rhythm.” A “poem,” according to Websters, is “a piece of writing designed as a unit and communicating to the reader the sense of a complete experience.” In a famous early twentieth-century lecture, A.C. Bradley said: “...an actual poem is the succession of experiences–sounds, images, thoughts, emotions–through which we pass when we are reading as poetically as we can....this experience is an end in itself, is worth having on its own account, has its own intrinsic worth alone. Poetry may also have an ulterior value as a means to culture or religion....So much the better.... But its ulterior worth neither is nor can directly determine its poetic worth as a satisfying imaginative experience...and the nature of poetry is to be not a part, nor yet a copy of the real world..., but to be a world by itself, independent, complete, autonomous.” Using a printed outline of Bradley’s lecture, “Hâfez’s Ghazals as Poetry” engages two Hâfezian ghazals, QG1/Kh1 and a ghazal suggested by the paper’s audience, in seeking to identify what in those texts make them poems.