The poet and playwright Sa‘id Soltanpur (1940-1981) achieved popular success among at least some segments of Iranian society in his lifetime, even as his poetry received scathing criticism from older, more-established poets and critics of the day. In fact, while Soltanpur’s poetry readings would attract large and often impassioned audiences, critics like Reza Baraheni rejected Soltanpur’s writings entirely and refused even to acknowledge the lines as poetry. Instead, these critics accused Soltanpur of composing mere slogans (sho‘âr) and not true poetry (she‘r). In this paper, I ask how Soltanpur’s detractors--Baraheni and poet Ahmad Shamlu perhaps most prominent among them--defined authentic poetry. Then I consider whether Soltanpur’s poetry indeed falls short of their notions of authenticity. Such questions might begin to elucidate Soltanpur’s almost total exclusion from the modern Persian canon, a condition that persists today. To locate the writings’ presumably “inauthentic” qualities, the paper will consider both Soltanpur’s poetry and his essays on literature and art. Soltanpur in fact composed poems with echoes of classical Persian forms and diction and his theoretical writings likewise suggest the poet’s serious engagement with aesthetic concerns. At the same time, his Marxist political activities, imprisonment, and execution all attest to Soltanpur’s unwavering political commitment. Thus the question remains: why did critics--even some self-proclaimed “committed” critics--vehemently and absolutely dismiss Soltanpur as an unserious sloganeer in a period when, as several Persian literary historians report, the rhetoric of “committed” literature dominated Persian poetics? In other words, how and why does Soltanpur’s poetry, even as it seems to embody the dominant radicalism of pre-revolutionary Iranian poetics, fail to fulfill what might be called the “mainstream” critical demand for authentic poetry? Finally, by engaging Soltanpur’s writing on its own terms, this paper addresses a void in English scholarship and continues the critical work of poet Saeed Yousef in his untranslated 1987 study of Soltanpur and the Iranian “guerilla poetry” of the 1970s , Now‘i az Naqd bar Now‘i az She‘r (A Type of Criticism of a Type of Poetry).