Fereydoun Moshiri
فریدون مشیریOne of the most widely read poets of modern Iran, whose gentle love poems kept a foot in both the old music and the new.
- Known for
- Kucheh (The Alley)
- Forms
- New poetry (she'r-e now), Chaharpareh, Ghazal
- Places
- Tehranتهران
- Collection
- Contemporary
Moshiri was born in Tehran and spent most of his working life there, in the postal and telegraph service and as a literary editor for magazines. His first collection, Thirsting for the Storm, appeared in 1955.
He took the middle road between the classical poets and Nima's revolution. He often wrote in the chaharpareh, a modern stanza of four-line units that keeps regular metre and rhyme, and later in shorter, freer lines, but always with a clear music and plain words. His themes are love, kindness, peace and the beauty of ordinary life, and his poem Kucheh (The Alley), a lover's walk down a remembered street, is among the most recited Persian poems of the century.
Critics have sometimes found him too gentle; readers have not. Many of his lines are sung, quoted and learnt by heart in Iran and across the diaspora. He died in Tehran in 2000, at the age of 74.
Moshiri's poems are in copyright. We publish them only with permission from the rights holders; until then we write about the work.
Booksکتابها
The principal works of Fereydoun Moshiri.
Thirsting for the Storm
تشنهٔ توفانHis first collection, lyric poems of love and longing in regular metre and rhyme, many of them in the four-line stanzas he favoured. It announced a gentle, musical new voice that found a wide readership at once, and set the tone of tenderness and simple music that readers would come to associate with his name.
Fereydoun Moshiri in Iranian history
Iranian historyThe Pahlavi century and afterدوران پهلوی و پس از آن
Two Pahlavi shahs built railways, universities and a centralised state, while poets, novelists and film-makers created a new Persian culture. The era ended with the revolution of 1979.