User:Amir Ghandi/The Swan

The Swan is a poem by Nima Yooshij. The Swan was Yoshij's first poem after Afsaneh, with 44 lines, published in the Journal of Music on April 10, 1926. In The Swan, Yooshij still retains the influence of Romantic poetry, but it is also his first symbolic poem. “The Swan” upends arguments that Iranian poets required new, freer poetic forms in order to express new, freer poetic content. Rather, Yooshij here working closely with the earlier poetic tradition (particularly with form) to create something new yet similar, and certainly not breaking away from traditional prosody.

Context
In the 1920s, thanks to Afsaneh, Yooshij had become a symbol of breaking the tradition in the eyes of some and insane in the eyes of some. Yooshij, however, believed that She'r-e Nimaa'i had not yet been able to break away from traditional Iranian poetry and establish anything new. Nima worked as a government bureaucrat in the Archives Division of the Ministry of Finance during the 1920’s, he sartorially set himself apart by wearing a traditional robe, boots, and fur hat, completing the look by carrying a knife at his waist. “He needed all that,” Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak explains, “to let his bosses know that he was not like the others. The ‘knife at the waist’ image, which also surfaces in accounts written by his colleagues, tells of the basic incongruity between Nima’s upbringing and the position he now held in the stolid bureaucracy of 1920s Iran.”

books

 * Sociology of Nima Poetry, Ali Zia al-Dini, Negah Publications, 2011. ISBN 9789643515324
 * A look at Nima Yoshij's poetry: A discussion on how poetic systems originated, Omid Tabib Zadeh, Niloofar Publications, 2010. ISBN 9789644484063
 * King of Conquest, Mohammad Reza Shafiei Kadkani, ed. Milad Azimi, 2010. ISBN 9789643723408