From Poet to King, to King of Poets: Responses to a Panegyric Ghazal by Hāfez

The response poem is a useful tool in analyzing the shifting attitudes of poets to their predecessors, and critical models initially developed for European imitatio can shed still more light on the nature of the Persian response poem. These models range from the all-encompassing statement of Harold Bloom—“Every poem is a response to another poem”—to Thomas Greene’s multiple levels of imitation that specify the hermeneutics of imitators. In the middle of these two are many others: Lyne, for example, describes imitation and allusion as “designed intertextuality” that admits other voices into a text, and Barchiesi suggests that models leave traces within the imitative text that can both lead to a deeper reading of the imitative text and guide the reader to a new interpretation of the model text.

This paper examines a series of response poems linking some of the most prominent poets of the Persian tradition from the 8th/14th to the 11th/17th centuries: Hāfez, Jāmī, Mohtasham, and Sā’eb. The model ghazal by Hāfez is a praise poem dedicated to Sultan Ghiās al-Dīn, and each subsequent poet manipulates the panegyric nature of the model to reflect his own social position within the patronage system. These four poets each fall into distinctive periods of the Persian poetic tradition, and rarely does one consider them in terms of poetic continuity. Even more rarely are Jāmī and Mohtasham, best known for romances and religious strophic poems respectively, considered primarily as authors of panegyric ghazals.

This paper analyzes the model and response poems of these four poets through the critical lens of criticism on European imitatio in order to explore the dialogue that develops both between poets and between poet and society. Through this study emerge several patterns, not only of the shifts of attitude from the conservatism of Jami to the fresh style of Sā’eb, but also of the changing nature of poetic patronage and its effects on poetic composition.