Perfumed Speech of a Poet-Pharmacist

Farid al-Din ʿAṭṭâr (d. 1221) was a well-known sufi poet who composed a large divân and several didactic mas̱navis. The latter have been a particular focus of recent scholarship, which tends to emphasize their allegorical structure and theological teachings (Ritter, Pourjavady, Corbin, et al.). In addition to their sufi content, however, the mas̱navis also offer a wealth of metapoetic reflections on literary composition and reception that help us reconstruct an implicit poetics that infuses ʿAṭṭâr’s (and other poets’) work, but which was never explicitly theorized.
ʿAṭṭâr routinely likens speech to medicine. The metaphor is pervasive throughout his oeuvre, and even highlighted by his own pen name. This is more than mere ornamentation; it is indicative of a particular way of thinking about poetry and its effects on its audiences. As a form of spiritual medicine, poetry not only carries meaning, but also affects its recipients on a bodily and emotive level, ontologically transforming them by elevating them to a state of spiritual health. It thus points to a medieval understanding of poetry as fundamentally embodied, functional, and pragmatic, which does not easily sit with the modernist and romantic assumptions about poetry that dominate today.
This paper explores the dual meaning of “ʿAṭṭâr” as druggist and perfumist, which reflects a more fundamental entanglement of the beautiful, the meaningful, and the useful in Islamicate thought. The medicinal metaphor’s logic organizes how ʿAṭṭâr imagines his own authorship, the function of his poetry, and the reception of his work. Like any doctor, he must demonstrate his own medicinal authority before he can prescribe his drugs to others. Drawing on longstanding cultural associations between doctors and preachers, he confesses his own spiritual weakness and makes himself the target of his own didactic admonishments; by publicly “taking his own medicine,” he proves his sincerity and thus his homiletic authority. Readers, too, must consume his poems according to particular regimes to maximize their transformative power. Through the pervasive association of poetic speech and medicine, ʿAṭṭâr’s works are presented as sites of daily, ritualized reading, therapies directed at the development and maintenance of spiritual health. In keeping with panel’s goals, the paper reveals new ways of reading Persian didactic poetry by uncovering a pre-modern poetics that valorizes poetry’s physiological and pragmatic aspects.