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“From the Effulgence of Silences”: Emanation, Creativity, and Aesthetics in the Poetry of Sa'eb Tabrizi
Abstract
From the time of al-F?r?bi and Ebn Sin?, philosophers in the Islamic tradition have accounted for natural beauty by arguing that God as al-Jam?l, the Beautiful, created a world that manifests this aspect of his being. But Moll? Sadr? (d. 1638), leader of the later School of Isfahan, was probably the first to extend this argument to the creation and purposes of the beauty intentionally fashioned by humans in the form of the arts. This paper will examine how Moll? Sadr?’s aesthetic theory may intersect with the poetry of the foremost verbal artist of seventeenth-century Persia, S?’eb Tabrizi (d. 1676). Though it is unlikely that the two were personally acquainted, S?’eb spent most of his life in Isfahan and certainly knew two of Sadr?’s foremost students and sons-in-law. More significantly, S?’eb’s poetry also repeatedly explores the nature, practice, and ethics of the creative process. Perhaps the key term in this poetics is feyz, the emanation, effulgence, or spiritual force that animates all aspects of the cosmos and a word that appears hundreds of times in S?’eb’s poetry. Although the neo-platonic ontology to which this concept is central can be forbiddingly abstruse, S?’eb gives this philosophical abstraction a visual or tactile form with images such as dawn light, the coming of spring, and the hospitality of the banquet. The cognitive semantics of these images not only delineates S?’eb’s apprehension of poetic creativity, but also enacts this dynamic force in a complex play of metaphor and figurative language that is the distinctive beauty of his Fresh Style.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Iran
Sub Area
13th-18th Centuries