Dowlatābādi’s Failed Attempt at Poetic Modernization

In 1911, Yahyā Dowlatābādi published two poems of an unusual kind. Turning away from his customary poetic practice, as well as from a millennial tradition of exclusive quantitative meters (‘arūz), he produced a couple of poems which he dubbed "syllabic" (še‘r-e silābi). This was at the time when the Persian poetic tradition as a whole was diversely challenged by the actors of the “Literary Revolution” (enqelāb-e adabi). For all their variety, modernist undertakings aimed to meet a single demand: to break away from the past. Unlike other contemporaneous achievements, however, Dowlatābādi’s syllabic poems were discarded as insignificant and never followed up on. This paper aims to shed some light on Dowlatābādi’s rare undertaking, and on the possible reasons for its failure.