Applies formal analysis to several of the early modernist poems Nīmā Yūshīj wrote in Persian in the 1920s and 1930s. I purposefully highlight how Nīmā incorporates not only premodern Arabic prosody, but also premodern Arabic literary devices – especially muʿāraḍah or “contrafaction”– into his modernist Persian poetry. Ultimately, I argue that he uses contrafaction to sublate the past into the present in a way that contrasts sharply with the Pahlavi dynasty’s use of the Iranian past (or rather, a very specific version of that past) to fabricate a new, modern, national myth. For instance, the Pahlavis built mausoleums for premodern Persian literary exemplars like Hafiz, Attar, Omar Khayyam, and the author of the Iranian national epic, Ferdowsi, highlighting their essential Persianness in opposition to the rich history of Islam and Arabic in the region. I read poems like 1926’s “The Swan” and 1938’s “The Phoenix” to show how Nīmā develops the planetary modernist theme of death and rebirth (perhaps best known as the thematic engine of Eliot’s The Waste Land) to his own ends. I argue that by treating poetry as a craft we can better understand how Arab and Iranian modernists resisted nationalist mythmaking by deploying the past differently.

This chapter examines the courses modernist Arabic poetry took in Iraq following Sayyāb’s premature death in 1964. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī (d. 1999) was a well-known poetic rival of Sayyāb who remained affiliated with the Communist Party even after the difficulties Communists grappled with during the 1950s. As the decade went on, fallout from the Iranian coup was compounded by nearly-simultaneous revelations about the realities of Joseph Stalin’s authoritarian rule following his death in 1953. I focus on the existential crisis Bayātī faced when the hopeful possibilities of 1950s decolonization efforts became more and more limited in the face of rising totalitarianism in the Middle East. Despite the changing political situation in the region manifested in, for instance, the rise of the Iraqi Baath and the increasing authoritarianism of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s regime in Egypt, modernists continued to use the same techniques in the 1960s that their predecessors had employed two decades earlier. Specifically, like Nīmā before him, Bayātī uses another premodern Arabic poetic device – taḍmīn or “poetic quoting”– to sublate premodern traditions into modernist poetry.