Şi‘r-i Nev ile Şi‘r-i Sefîd Arasında: Çağdaş Farsçada Şiir, Garip ve Türkçe Şiirde Farsça Etkisi Meselesi [Between She‘r-e Now and She‘r-e Sepīd: Contemporary Poetry in Persian, Garip, and the Question of Persian Influence in Turkish Poetry]

The she'r-e now (new poetry) movement, having started with Nīmā’s celebrated poem “Afsānah,” went against the strict use of meter and rhyme in classical Persian poetry. In later stages of she'r-e now, the she'r-e safīd (white poetry) poets, of which Ahmad-e Shāmlū was the leading figure, moved towards a new type of free verse-like poetry, totally disregarding the importance of poetic harmony overall. When we look at she'r-e now’s initial years of activity, we see that this movement is contemporaneous with Garip in Turkey; and similarly, she'r-e safīd was also active during the same years that the İkinci Yeni (second new) poets produced their first books. Yet being contemporaneous with Garip, the innovation that she'r-e now brought to poetry in Persian could be an equal of Tevfīk Fikret’s “serbest müstezāt” convention (a type of free verse popularized during the Tanzīmāt era). In a similar fashion, that of she'r-e safīd would be an equal of the innovation that Garip brought to twentieth-century poetry in Turkish by breaking all the classical rules of previous conventions. One of the main reasons for this is that even though Nīmā and Shāmlū broke away with meter and rhyme, they were not able to break away completely from what Garip poets directed their criticism at: the notions of şairānelik (poeticality), eda (concord or manner), and istiare (metaphor) in poetry. Shāmlū went against āhang, a Persian word denoting poetic harmony, but āhang was never negated completely. Though both she'r-e now and she'r-e safīd tried to use spoken Persian a lot in their poetry, they were never able to abandon the harmony of written Persian completely in comparison to their contemporaries writing in Turkish. These two contemporaneous developments seem to be independent from one another, but we can still say that certain sociopolitical changes during the nineteenth century as well as the European influence were important factors in the development of twentieth-century poetry in Persian and Turkish. I will further assess the historical developments of twentieth-century poetry in Persian with a specific focus on the works of Faraydūn-e Moshīrī, who found the middle ground between she'r-e now and she'r-e safīd in terms of both form and aesthetics.