Rebellion and Metaphorical Constructs: Unlikely Portrayals in Contemporary Persian Poetry

In this paper, I am concerned with the pre-revolutionary committed poetry as autonomous metaphorical constructions. Leftist, Marxist, and revolutionary literary theorists have never been shy in expressing the need to employ aesthetics and literary devises to promote a revolutionary cause. Furthermore, there is no doubt that they were right in assessing the power of metaphor and their coded language; committed authors were highly successful in exciting a vast readership and in promoting their revolutionary ideas through the use of highly influential metaphorical constructs. Reemphasizing that the strength and success of the revolutionary messages were related to the broader socio political exigencies, this paper also argues that committed literary works were not successful in their creation of aesthetics or in their use of literary devices in support of their message. Their metaphorical constructs, a very common device, often based on natural phenomena (mountain, forest, bird, rain) or abstract concepts (suffering, pain, hope) were for example in many cases highly improbable and uncanny. By analyzing a number of poems by S. Sultanpur, A. Shamlu, M. Garmarudi, and S. Kadkani, the paper shows that these poets' metaphorical constructions could only be communicated to a readership that was ready for deciphering their codes and understanding their message regardless of the aesthetic quality of the work. Both their mutiny and metaphorical constructions, however, offered strange notions that stood in contrast with the more universal modern notion of literature. In contemplating these points through close reading and textual analysis, the paper also draws attention to the debates over the nature of modern poetry in general, and will benefit from the works of such western critics as Sisson, Pratt, and William.