Iran and Persian Literature: The Essence of Persian Culture

　　In the news, Iran is most often spoken of in the context of nuclear issues and military tension. Yet anyone who has encountered the country becomes aware of another stream running beneath its culture: poetry.
For the people of the Persian-speaking world, poetry is not a classic lying at the back of a bookshelf but a living culture, woven into daily conversation, into the streetscape, and even into the conduct of the state. This essay offers an overview of Persian literature, introduces examples of the poetry in which Iranians take pride, and then considers how that poetry continues to act upon Iran today.

　　To begin with, whose literature is "Persian literature"? The question is more complex than it looks. As we are accustomed to the framework of the modern nation-state, we are tempted to equate it simply with "the literature of Iran." The geographical reach of literature written in Persian, however, extends far beyond Iran's present borders.
　　Persian is not only the official language of today's Iran; it also holds official status in Afghanistan as Dari and in Tajikistan as Tajik. Communities who speak Persian as a mother tongue or understand it live in neighboring countries such as Iraq, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.
From the tenth century onward, poetry in this language traveled across regions together with poets and manuscripts, coming to be read as far east as Central Asia and northern India, and as far west as the Anatolian Peninsula.
　　Persian literature (Persian poetry in particular), in short, is a rich literary tradition nurtured across borders. Seen only through the lens of the modern nation-state, its historical breadth and depth become difficult to make out. Grasping this point at the outset is the starting point for understanding Iran from the side of its culture.

　　Persian is often called "the language of poetry," and the reason is the extraordinary accumulation of verse the language has produced. Concrete examples will be covered in due course below.
　　What is striking is that poetic structure permeates not only literary works properly but everyday phrases. The famous tribute "Isfahan is half the world," for instance, rhymes at the word endings in Persian: Esfahān nesf-e jahān. Even oral culture and everyday expressions are clothed in poetic structure. This is the sort of thing one comes to feel when walking the streets and talking with people.
　　On entering the world of Persian poetry, the first thing that astonishes is the rigor of its form. In traditional verse, the metrical patterns are strictly fixed in advance, and the poet composes the entire work within that framework. There are several metrical patterns to choose from, but once a pattern is chosen it must be sustained to the very end of the poem and it is precisely here that a poet's skill is put on display.
　　The work that embodies the awesome force of this constraint is Ferdowsi's national epic, the Shāhnāmeh (Book of Kings). Born in the tenth century in Khorasan under the Samanid dynasty, the poet is said to have devoted more than thirty years to the work, beginning around 980 and completing this monument around 1010. Its scale runs to roughly sixty thousand couplets — that is, some one hundred and twenty thousand lines. What is more, the whole of it, from first to last, is written in the masnavi form, in which the end rhyme changes with each couplet. Crystallizing the myths, legends, and history of ancient Persia into verse to raise the spirits of a people conquered by the Arab empire, the work is regarded to this day as a cultural inheritance that defines Iranian national identity. 
　　In the Persian cultural sphere, even the writing of history — a genre for which prose would ordinarily be the natural vehicle — has been dealt with by the form of poetry.
　　At the same time, and in contrast to this strictness of form, the spirit of Persian poetry often vaults lightly over worldly wealth and calculation. A well-known verse by Hafez, the fourteenth-century poet of Shiraz, tells the tale: "If that maiden of Shiraz would take my heart in hand, for the dark mole on her cheek I would give Samarkand and Bukhara alike[1]." This sensibility, placing beauty, love, and a worldview that might be seen as hedonistic, above such worldly gains as riches and territory, is the very essence of the Persian lyric, the ghazal[2].

　　Emblematic of Persian literature's international prestige, meanwhile, is Sa'di, a poet active in the thirteenth century from that same Shiraz. Living through the age of the Mongol conquests and writing, after long years of wandering, the Golestān (The Rose Garden) — a masterpiece of didactic literature — back in his hometown, he is counted alongside Hafez among the most beloved of Iran's poets. A splendid mausoleum, the Sa'diyeh, stands in the northeastern part of the city and is now a popular site for visitors. The passage in his work beginning "Bani Ādam" ("The children of Adam" — all humankind are kin) — a poem of the ideal of human fellowship, in which human beings are the parts of a single body and, when one suffers, the whole feels the pain — is said to be displayed inside the United Nations Headquarters in New York.
　　While accounts vary as to the form and circumstances of its installation, verses composed in Persian nearly eight hundred years ago are invoked today as words expressing the ideal of international cooperation. The poem is also known to have been quoted by Barack Obama, who, having taken office as US president in January 2009, recorded a video message that March addressed to Iran's leaders and people on the occasion of the Iranian New Year. It is precisely such episodes that speak for the depth of Persian literature. Persian verse composition, given the rigor of its forms, demands a high order of technique; but the value of works produced with that technique resonates beyond any particular nation or age.

　　There is one perspective here that must not be overlooked: Persian poetry is a living voice, still sung to melody today. Just as Japan's biwa hōshi — minstrels who recited tales while playing the biwa lute — handed down their stories, Iran keeps alive a tradition of singing poetry to the accompaniment of the setar (a four-stringed instrument, similar to a guitar) and the santur (a kind of hammered dulcimer). What is sung there are poems written, at times, a thousand years ago.
　　Turned around, this carries weighty implications. Whoever hopes to create genuinely meaningful work today must have absorbed this millennium of accumulation. Novelty alone will not carry the day. Without a dialogue with the past, nothing can be said in Persian.Nor does this power of poetry stop at the literary domain.
　　Even the summit of political power has stood within the frame of poetry's language. Ali Khamenei, who served for many years from 1989 as Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, also had a face as a poet. Amid the upheavals of 2025–2026 — the strange lull that stretched from the subsiding of the June 2025 "Twelve-Day War" with Israel to the protests that spread through Tehran and other major cities from the end of that year into the beginning of the next he released a poem. Composed in strict classical form while deftly weaving into the verse the meaning of his pen name, "Amin" (the trustworthy one), the work perhaps demonstrated the symbolic significance of a leader still choosing poetry as his medium in a time of crisis[3]. Khamenei lost his life at the end of February 2026 in attacks by the United States and Israel, and the country's political order, too, was visibly shaken. Though the man has fallen, however, the poetry itself remains. Indeed, it is precisely in persisting beyond the lives and deaths of the powerful that the essence of this culture lies.

　　Iran today is a state that has placed Islam at the very foundation of its political order. And yet, in speaking of this country, poetry is a key that cannot be passed over. Persian poetry, an accumulation of more than a thousand years reckoning back to the Samanid period, remains settled in people's minds even now as collective memory; and is it not precisely that condition which forms the core of the Iranian experience? When we discern this underground current beyond the news of nuclear programs and military affairs, we come to stand at the entrance to understanding this country together with the depth of its culture.

[1] Quoted from Tsuneo Kuroyanagi, trans., Hāfizu shishū [The Poems of Hafez], Tōyō Bunko series, 1976.
[2] While the verse can be read in this way, the worldview the poet sought to express through the poem as a whole admits of a wide range of interpretations, and its true intent is exceedingly difficult to grasp.
Image: from a manuscript of the collected poems of Hafez (W.628), the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, USA.
https://art.thewalters.org/object/W.628.87A/
[3] In November 2025, to mark Student Day, a ghazal by Khamenei was released through a youth-oriented media outlet.
(https://www.khabaronline.ir/news/2137599/...)
The poem, which opens "Morning has come, my beloved — rouse your ardor," draws on the classical contrast of night and dawn to call for the awakening of the next generation. It carries end rhyme, as the conventions of the ghazal require, and its closing line weaves in the pen name "Amin" (the trustworthy one), in keeping with traditional form.

References

1. Yamauchi Masayuki, et al. Iwanami Isurāmu jiten [Iwanami Dictionary of Islam]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2009.
2. Kuroyanagi, Tsuneo. Hāfizu shishū [The Poems of Hafiz]. Tōyō Bunko. Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1976.
3. Iran’s gift to the United Nations Headquarters. https://www.un.org/ungifts/persian-carpet
4. Videotaped Remarks by the President in Celebration of Nowruz. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/videotaped-remarks-president-celebration-nowruz