The Beloved in Nader Naderpour’s Poetry

Abstract

This paper offers a new picture of a modern Iranian poet and Nobel Prize nominee, Nader Naderpour, in light of his take on the feminine. The paper is an analysis of some less known love poems most of which were expurgated from his collections of poems after the Islamic revolution in 1979 in his home country. In his long and prolific career, he composed many poems celebrating the beloved in various ways. His outlook on the feminine ranged from simple poems detailing erotic and sexual scenes to very romantic and idealistic pictures of ethereal soul-mates. Naderpour’s well-known power of vision, making him a significant modern Persian poet in this regard, enabled him to produce women in many forms, earthly or heavenly, literal or symbolic. Thus, in Naderpour one can find the voice of a typical modern Persian male poet as regards the beloved.