Shahriar

Mohammad-Hossein Behjat Tabrizi took the pen name Shahriar (prince, or lord of the city) from a line of Hafez. Born in Tabriz, he went to Tehran to study medicine and left the course shortly before qualifying, a turn in his life bound up in legend with an unhappy love that his admirers have retold ever since.

He became the most popular writer of the ghazal, the short rhymed lyric, in mid-century Iran: classical in form, intimate and devotional in tone, and close to the cadences of speech. He also wrote, unusually for a poet of his generation, in his mother tongue, Azerbaijani Turkish. Heydar Babaya Salam, a long poem addressed to a hill above his childhood village, is read across Iranian Azerbaijan, the Republic of Azerbaijan and Turkey.

He spent his last decades in Tabriz, died in Tehran in September 1988 and is buried in Tabriz at the Maqbarat-osh-Sho'ara, the Tomb of Poets. The anniversary of his death is kept in Iran as National Poetry Day.

Shahriar's poems are in copyright. We publish them only with permission from the rights holders; until then we write about the work.