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The Persian Conception of Artistic Unity in Poetry and its Implications in Other Fields

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

G. M. Wickens
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Extract

This article takes as its point of departure the conclusions drawn in Professor Arberry's paper “Orient Pearls at Random Strung”. It is hopefully intended both to add to those conclusions in their own sphere of poetical criticism and to suggest something of the relevance of the problem as a whole in the broad structure of Persian thought. (It seems scarcely necessary to add that the extent to which that will imply Islamic thought and Eastern thought generally is, in every sense of the word, incalculable.)

Type
Articles
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , June 1952 , pp. 239 - 243
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 1952

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References

page 239 note 1 BSOAS., vol. xi, part iv, pp. 699–712.Google Scholar The same scholar's introductory essay to his anthology Ḥâfiẓ (Fifty Poems) is a further elaboration of his theme.

page 239 note 2 The word is used here not only in the technical sense, but with considerable reference to the basic idea in the verb δpav.

page 239 note 3 Walter Leaf's reference (art. cit., p. 704) to the “internal” unity of Western art and thought is, as will later appear, less a contradiction of this statement than an ambiguously phrased affirmation of its purport.

page 240 note 1 Where such focal points are numerous—and they are seldom less than three or four—they tend themselves to assume a radial grouping.

page 240 note 2 With the fascinating and inexhaustible subject of the significance of the imagery and its associations I cannot here concern myself. It may be remarked in passing what a wholly appropriate medium symbolic imagery presents for working in the sphere of the immutable.

page 241 note 1 We may have here an important additional criterion, used with moderation, towards establishing the long-desired “standard” ḥâfiẓ text. Thus, while it would exclude no lines from the present text, it would permit fresh consideration of lines not here included, which have presumably been rejected partly on account of their lateness, partly because of their failure to fit the numerous other types of pattern.

page 242 note 1 Horten, , Philosophie des Islam, p. 13.Google Scholar

page 242 note 2 Professor Nicholson's study, The Idea of Personality in Ṣûfism, bears convincing testimony to the lacunae in Islamic thought and expression which a consideration of this problem would surely have gone far towards filling.

page 242 note 3 Introduction à la Théologie Musulmane, by Gardet and Anawati, Préface, p. v.Google Scholar