Multiple Engagements, Singular Vision: Fifty Years of Shafi‘i-Kadkani’s Poetry

The poetry of Mohammad Reza Shafi‘i Kadkani (b. 1939) has received increasingly laudatory praise in recent years, with some critics even suggesting that the poet and scholar deserves a place among the towering figures of Nima Yushij, Ahmad Shamlu, Forugh Farrokhzad, Sohrab Sepehri, and Mehdi Akhavan Sales in the pantheon of modern Persian verse. Such critics tend to read Shafi‘i’s poetry as an expression of a timeless and universal human experience, emphasizing the poet’s sustained engagements with classical Persian poetry and Islamic mystical discourse. However, in the decades surrounding the Islamic Revolution, several prominent critics celebrated the same poems for Shafi‘i’s symbolic interventions in the armed struggle that eventually overturned the Iranian monarchy. But whether with the fervor of the revolutionary years or with today’s presumably more dispassionate scholarly approaches, these critical readings have resembled one another in the way that they treat the neo-classical, spiritual, and politically committed aspects as discrete and fundamentally separable components of Shafi‘i’s poetics. This paper presents a new reading of Shafi‘i’s poetics vis-á-vis the existing critical debates by arguing that the poet’s notion of socially-engaged or committed poetry cannot be separated from that poetry’s aesthetic and contemplative work. In Shafi‘i’s poetics, the paper will argue, poetry serves as a locus for imagining various realities, a mission that not only allows for poetry to simultaneously voice ideological stances on contemporary issues, regenerate the classical poetic canon, and reformulate mystical discourses, but indeed a mission in which these various elements naturally and necessarily coexist. Thus the paper sheds new light on theoretical questions on literature’s social function and the historical particularities of canon formation in the Persian context by arguing that Shafi‘i ultimately commits to a vision of poetry as a both critical and imaginative act.