AnonymClassic Research Fellow, Theodore S. Beers, presents at the workshop convened by Ingela Nilsson (Uppsala) and Nikos Zagklas (Vienna), held at The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities in Stockholm.

Abstract: Occasions of patronage and performance have been central to the classical Persian poetic tradition since its inception over a millennium ago. The earliest poets, such as Rūdakī (d. ca. 940 CE), Daqīqī (d. ca. 976), and Firdawsī (d ca. 1020), tended to be affiliated with courts, and they earned their keep by composing verse to aggrandize those rulers. This model encompassed various forms of poetry, from the panegyric ode (qaṣīdah) to the epic written in couplets (maṡnavī). (Perhaps the quintessential poetic occasion in the early centuries was the performance of a new qaṣīdah for a ruler during the spring festival, Nawrūz, or the autumn festival, Mihragān.) As time went on, another type of poem rose to supreme popularity in Persian that was less tied to the court environment: the love lyric (ghazal). But the question of occasion was no less applicable. Poets would gather and share ghazals with one another, sometimes extemporizing verse. It was also common for a poet to compose a response (javāb) to a work by one of his or her predecessors or contemporaries, using the same meter and rhyme as the original but taking the content in a different direction. This practice can be viewed as creating an occasion, irrespective of the geographic or temporal distance between the two poets. When studying a classical Persian poem, then, it is always important to consider the circumstances of composition, the audiences or interlocutors (in multiple senses), etc.

These are unremarkable observations. A more interesting question is how we can learn about the occasions of Persian poetry, beyond the limitations of analyzing the poetry itself. Among the most valuable sources for this purpose are taẕkirahs, or literary anthologies— sometimes referred to under the rubric of “lives of the poets” or “biographical dictionaries.” In simple terms, a taẕkirah collects biographical information about poets and selections from their verse. Works in this genre were written frequently, and with growing inventiveness, from around the end of the fifteenth century onward. For the later medieval and early modern periods in particular, taẕkirahs greatly enrich our knowledge of developments in literary history. An entry in one of these texts may describe a patronage relationship, the context in which a given poem was composed, an exchange of javābs, or any number of other features.

In this paper, I will provide a brief overview of the different kinds of “occasional discussion” that occur in a single taẕkirah, the Tuḥfah-i Sāmī (ca. 1550). The author, Sām Mīrzā (d. 1567), was a prince of the Safavid dynasty, and so he acted both as a littérateur and as a patron in his own right. His anthology documents the activities of hundreds of Iranian poets— professional and amateur—from the first half of the sixteenth century. These individuals represent a wide range of social classes, including those active in the court and the bazaar.