The most famous of Abu al-Qasim Lahuti’s poetic works, from the Iranian, Turkish, and Soviet chapters of his career, have tended to be those qasidas and masnavis in which he harnessed a Persian classical form to serve his political message. Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak has done much to complicate scholars’ excessive focus on the most obvious trappings of form in tracing the development of Persian poetic modernism, preferring a nuanced view of how images, tropes, and unities were reworked even in ostensibly neoclassical poems by poets such as Lahuti. However, a reexamination of Lahuti’s importance to Persian “new verse” [shi’r-i naw] must go further. From his time in Istanbul through the whole of his Soviet career, Lahuti also experimented widely with non-classical forms, in some respects anticipating the later experiments of Iranian innovators such as Nima Yushij and Ahmad Shamlu. Lahuti’s formal experiments were relatively little-imitated by his literary followers in Soviet Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, who preferred his heroic masnavis, and they also appear to have made little impact in Iran, where his lifelong absence limited the role that he could play in the new literary circles. Furthermore, his lifelong commitment to working simultaneously in neoclassical and experimental styles was unusual, even bewildering, in the context of mid-century Persian culture wars between those who declared themselves for and against the entire classical tradition. In this respect, he more closely resembles younger generations of poets such as Mahdi Akhavan-Salis or Sa’id Sultanpur, for whom classical and new forms simply served different purposes. A re-reading of Lahuti’s Soviet corpus of “new verse” in the context of his contemporaneous neoclassical works will provide, in miniature, an alternate history of the birth of Persian poetic modernism.