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Which poets helped establish new poetry in Iran during the 20th century?
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Persian literature
Ceramic wine bottle, fritware, Iran, second half of the 17th century; in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
In the 20th century, the movement to establish "new poetry" (shi'r-i now) in Iran was initiated by Nima Yushij, who proposed a radical renewal of Persian poetry regarding its content, prosody, and imagery.1
While Nima Yushij introduced these ideas in the 1920s, they were not widely adopted until the 1940s by a younger generation of poets. The leading figures who helped establish this new style included:
- Ahmad Shamlu1
- Forough Farrokhzad12
- Mehdi Akhvan-e Sales1
- Nader Naderpour1
Additionally, Sohrab Sepehri occupied a special place in this movement with his distinct mystical evocations of nature. By approximately 1960, this revolution in Persian poetics had become firmly established, with many subsequent schools of poetry further developing the modernist principles originally introduced by Nima Yushij.1