Sufism and American Literary Masters

SUNY series in Islam

—————
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, editor
Sufism and American Literary Masters

Edited by

Mehdi Aminrazavi

Foreword by
Jacob Needleman
Cover art from Fotolia

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2014 State University of New York

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sufism and American literary masters / edited by Mehdi Aminrazavi ; foreword by

  Jacob Needleman.
    pages cm. — (SUNY series in islam)
  Includes bibliographical references and index.
  ISBN 978-1-4384-5353-8 (hc.: alk. paper)
  1. American poetry—Islamic influences.  2. Sufi poetry, American—History and
criticism.  3. Sufism in literature.  4. Muslims in literature.  5. Islam in literature.
6. Mysticism in literature.  I. Aminrazavi, Mehdi.  II. Needleman, Jacob.

  PS166.S85 2014
 810.9'382974—dc23 2014028931

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Mitra, my daughter for her resilience and
courage in light of adversity
‫ ﭘﺮﺗﻮ ﮐﺎﺷﺎﻧﻪﮫ ﺗﻮﻳﯾﯽ ﺗﻮ‬،٬ ‫ﻫﮬﮪھﺮ ﺟﺎ ﮐﻪﮫ ﺭرﻭوﻡم‬ ‫ ﺻﺎﺣﺐ ﺁآﻥن ﺧﺎﻧﻪﮫ ﺗﻮﻳﯾﯽ ﺗﻮ‬،٬ ‫ﻫﮬﮪھﺮ ﺩدﺭر ﮐﻪﮫ ﺯزﻧﻢ‬

‫ﻣﻘﺼﻮﺩد ﻣﻦ ﺍاﺯز ﮐﻌﺒﻪﮫ ﻭو ﺑﺘﺨﺎﻧﻪﮫ ﺗﻮﻳﯾﯽ ﺗﻮ‬ ‫ﺩدﺭر ﻣﻴﯿﮑﺪﻩه ﻭو ﺩدﻳﯾﺮ ﮐﻪﮫ ﺟﺎﻧﺎﻧﻪﮫ ﺗﻮﻳﯾﯽ ﺗﻮ‬

‫ ﮐﻌﺒﻪﮫ ﻭو ﺑﺘﺨﺎﻧﻪﮫ ﺑﻬﮭﺎﻧﻪﮫ‬،٬ ‫ﻣﻘﺼﻮﺩد ﺗﻮﻳﯾﯽ‬

Thou art the dweller of every house on whose door I knock,

Whereever I sojourn, Thou art the Light of the door way.
Be it tavern or monastery, Thou art its soul of souls.
In praying to the Ka‘bah or the house of idols, I have Thee in mind,
The purpose is Thou, the Ka‘bah and the idol house are but an excuse.

Baha’ al-Din ‘Amili

 Contents

Foreword xi
Jacob Needleman

Introduction 1
Mehdi Aminrazavi

The English Romantic Background

 1. English Romantics and Persian Sufi Poets: A Wellspring of

Inspiration for American Transcendentalists 15
Leonard Lewisohn

The Master: Emerson and Sufism

 2. The Chronological Development of Emerson’s Interest in

Persian Mysticism 55
Mansur Ekhtiyar

 3. Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Muslim Orient 75

Marwan M. Obeidat

 4. Emerson and Aspects of Sa‘di’s Reception in

Nineteenth-Century America 91
Parvin Loloi

5. Emerson on Hafiz and Sa‘di: The Narrative of Love and Wine 117
Farhang Jahanpour

The Disciple: Walt Whitman

6. Whitman and Hafiz: Expressions of Universal Love and Tolerance 153

Mahnaz Ahmad
x Contents

 7. Walt Whitman and Sufism: Towards “A Persian Lesson” 163

Massud Farzan

The Initiates: Other American Authors

 8. Literary “Masters” in the Literature of Thomas Lake Harris,

Lawrence Oliphant, and Paschal Beverly Randolph 175
Arthur Versluis

 9. American Transcendentalists’ Interpretations of Sufism:

Thoreau, Whitman, Longfellow, Lowell, Melville, and
Lafcadio Hearn 191
John D. Yohannan

10. The Persians of Concord 213

Phillip N. Edmondson

11. Omarian Poets of America 221

Mehdi Aminrazavi

12. “Bond Slave to FitzGerald’s Omar”: Mark Twain and The Rubáiyát 245
Alan Gribben

13. Mark Twain’s Ruba‘iyyat: AGE–A Rubáiyát 253

Glossary 263

Bibliography 269

List of Contributors 279

Index 283
 Foreword

The essays in this book offer fascinating revelations concerning the correspon-
dences between Islamic mysticism and the work of such quintessentially Ameri-
can writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman,
Herman Melville, and Mark Twain. As such, this book is likely to take an
important place in the academic fields of American studies and comparative
literature. But its significance transcends the limits of academia and touches on
the deepest and most troubling questions of our present era. And in so doing, it
reminds us of the noble purpose of literature in the development of the mind.
Our world its seems exists mainly under influences that inevitably lead to
division and conflict, even as on the surface of events globalization and advancing
technology often inspire dreams of a united human family. It has become clear
that in our contemporary civilization, despite all hope to the contrary, fear, anger,
and avarice, the ancient devils that set human beings against each other, remain
the real “lords of life,” to appropriate an Emersonian phrase. The essential ques-
tion, which is now a literal matter of life and death, therefore remains: Where
and what are the forces that can lead individuals, peoples, and nations toward an
acceptance of each other in fact as well as in dreams, and inspire an awareness
of the ultimate oneness and value of life? The themes of the following essays
hold fundamental clues to the answer to this question.
Those clues reside in the juxtaposition of the words “Sufism” and the
names of some of the most iconic American writers of the nineteenth century.
Sufism is generally understood as both a doctrine and practice embedded in the
religion of Islam. These essays taken as a whole posit that somewhere behind the
historical, geopolitical, and philosophical incommensurabilities that now seem so
harshly to separate Islam from the views of mainstream America, there remain
significant traces of a philosophical convergence that resonates in some of the
most “American” poetry in existence. A study of these traces not only opens a
new avenue of mutual understanding between the Islamic and American souls,
but will provide a springboard for a deeper understanding of the opportuni-
ties that literatures provides as a medium for reconciling seemingly intractable
differences.

xi
xii Foreword

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1844 essay “The Over-Soul” remains one of the
most eloquent examples of nineteenth-century transcendentalism’s explication of
Indian spirituality. Of particular influence was the doctrine of Atman, or Higher
Self, which forms the essence of the human Self and is inseparable from Brahman,
which forms the corresponding essence of the universal Self. Part of Emerson’s
genius was his ability to reconsider such prototypical American values as the
emphasis on pragmatism and individual agency in the light of spiritual, even
esoteric reinterpretations of these values. Another case in point is “Self-Reliance”
(1841), which opens with a dynamic characterization of the American ideal of
individualism and self-determination and closes having reinterpreted such models
as mere facets of the Higher Self within.
This kind of work constitutes philosophy, and indeed literature itself, at the
height of their power: serving as reminders of humanity’s higher identity, which
is continually forgotten in the necessary life of action in the world. Through
great ideas greatly expressed, literature enables readers to function, and even
grow, in a cultural milieu that relies on a worldview and explanatory model
that tend to reductionist absolutism, relativism, titillation, and the provocations
of subjective morality.
Visionary works of philosophy and literature are among the cultural forces
necessary to open our minds to the possibility of transforming human beings, by
nature dangerously gifted animals, into instruments of conscience and compassion;
yet open-mindedness is not in itself enough, and here the meaning of Sufism
can perform an essential task. Sufism is indeed a system of ideas rooted in the
great perennial vision of man and reality that lies at the heart of all the world’s
spiritual traditions, but the contemporary, albeit modest, awakening interest in
Sufism is directed mainly to its status as a practice leading to a higher state of
Being. In short, Sufism is a Way. What is meant by that term is a guided inner
struggle, in which a man or woman strives to emerge from a state of egoism,
submitting to a supreme Goodness that is both idea and energy.
When the influence of Indian spiritual tradition was first appearing in
nineteenth-century America, any information was almost entirely limited to
purely philosophical content, with only fragmentary and speculative practical
applications. In general, the discipline, the full practice of the Way, was known
haphazardly, if at all. Even Hinduism, which mainly influenced the transcen-
dentalists and contains the idea of the practice of a Way at its heart, was seen
as pure philosophy with no central place in the day-to-day lives or writings of
the American Transcendentalists.
These days, the popularity of Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, as well as vari-
ous forms of yoga, indicate that at least certain components of the practice and
inner workings of Eastern religions have become a growing influence in Amer-
ica. Without such prevalent practical applications of Eastern spiritual traditions,
 Foreword xiii

including Sufism, the quest to reawaken and rediscover the Way within Western
religious traditions would be vastly impaired, perhaps to a debilitating extent.
We ask the same questions today that occupied the minds of every nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century American transcendentalist, including one most
relevant to our purposes: Can true literary masterworks reach beyond the worlds
of inspiration and ideas to aid in the practical search for finding solutions to
the universal problems of the human condition? In the light of the following
essays, we may begin to think about the ways in which Sufism illuminated the
writings and lives of the most influential American writers of the nineteenth
century, and also extrapolate the answers to apply to our lives two centuries later.

Jacob Needleman
 Introduction

For centuries, the Western fascination with the East has been the subject of
countless books, plays, and movies, particularly after the economic and intellec-
tual effects of colonialism in the early nineteenth century introduced “Oriental”
cultures to a sophisticated drawing-room audience. However, Hafiz, Sa‘di, Jami,
Rumi, and other Sufi masters had a place, however obscure and inaccurately
portrayed, in the corpus of English translations long before Oriental themes and
settings became a popular characteristic of nineteenth-century poetry. In fact,
Sufi poetry was available to a European audience as early as the sixteenth cen-
tury: the earliest reference to Persian poetry occurred in English in 1589, when
George Puttenham included four anonymous “Oriental” poems in translation in
The Arte of English Poesie; translations of Sa‘di’s Gulistan were available in Latin
as early as 1654’s Rosarium, translated by the Dutch orientalist Georgius Gentius.
From the early seventeenth century onward, Western interest in Persian and Sufi
poetry steadily increased, though such interest most often took the form of
general references to Persian language and culture and not to specific poets and
their works. Such references were already a standard component of the medieval
travel narrative, and almost always misidentified the names of Iranian and Arab
poets, mystics, and philosophers, accompanied by equally creative spelling varia-
tions. Moreover, there was no literary value attached to literal translations, and
no effort made to replicate the formal elements of the original poems. Instead,
Sufi poetry entered Western literary circles as versified adaptations or imitations.
Sa‘di’s Gulistan, Hafiz’s Divan, Omar Khayyam’s Ruba‘iyyat, as well as Firdawsi’s
monumental work of Persian epic Shah Nameh, were all available to English
audiences in some form by 1790. With their libertarian sentiments and didactic
bent, Sufis appealed to an Enlightenment-era mentality that emphasized deism
and an ethical rather than doctrinal conception of religion.
By the end of the seventeenth century, references to individual Sufi poets
occurred with greater accuracy and specificity. The Travels of Sir John Chardin
(1686) in particular was notable for its surprisingly accurate assessment of the
basic tenets of Jalal al-Din Rumi’s Mathnawi and Mahmud Shabistari’s Gulshan-i
raz, including Rumi’s proofs of the existence of God in man and the emphasis
on individual and social tranquility that lay at the heart of Sufism’s esoteric

1
2 Mehdi Aminrazavi

teachings. As a result of personal experience with the Sufis of Isfahan and a

detailed understanding of the Persian language, Chardin included an unprec-
edented amount of factual information about Sufism itself, such as an extensive
etymology of the term and an explanation of the important differences between
Sufism as a mystical order and Sufism as the political basis of the Safavid Dynasty.
Though themes such as the vanity of the world, the analogies between
experience in Nature and in love, and the inability of human reason to explain
or address the world’s mysteries were not unique to Sufism, they found an elo-
quence of expression in the ghazals of Hafiz, for instance, that resonated with
the nineteenth-century Western world even in translation. Though its traditional
themes and images were often exploited for purely aesthetic purposes, Sufi poetry
did in fact have a more significant effect on Romantic and Transcendental poetry
than simply providing a storehouse of Oriental imagery. The image of “the East”
as a place of great wisdom that possessed an esoteric knowledge lacking in the
West gained popularity due to its compatibility with the spirit of Romanticism,
which saw the essence of Eastern wisdom in the concept of carpe diem. The
phrase, meaning “seize the day,” was coined by the Roman lyric poet Horace, but
emerged as a popular theme in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century love poetry,
often as an incitement to a love affair. By the nineteenth century, carpe diem
had become an axiom as well as a poetic motif, and invoked a sense profound
spirituality intertwined with the very notion of daily existence that should not
be confused with the present-day, self-serving connotation of the phrase.
What is remarkable is that the spiritual map of “the East” of nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century Europe and America had no geographical location,
and all Easterners were allegedly conveying the same message—that of living in
the present, accompanied by a lack of concern for the material and a focus on
goodness, peace, and love. The fact that there is no such thing as a monolithic East
and that the Orient consists of diverse cultures was overshadowed by the inter-
est of European and American literary masters and intellectuals in developing a
utopian model inspired by the East. This fascination with the stereotypical image
of Eastern cultures may have had something to do with the wounds of post-Civil
War American society. As the extent of the inhumanity, cruelty, and tragedy of
the Civil War was becoming more and more apparent, the perceived Eastern
message of the temporality and fleeting nature of life and the idea of existence
being closely connected with suffering was indeed therapeutic and soothing to
the traumatized American society. Sufi beliefs in their most simplistic interpre-
tations resonated on the level of the national consciousness. “Eastern wisdom,”
with its perceived message of brotherhood and love, transcended boundaries of
education and sophistication. In fact, the spirit of universalism was so strong at
the time that Islam itself was of little interest to American scholars; it simply
served as the context within which Sufi poetry and prose were composed, not
the true source of its message. This, of course, was the case for all Eastern spiri-
 Introduction 3

tual traditions; the fact that they all were saying the same thing bore testament
to the universality of the message and the irrelevance of the particularity of the
religious doctrines that distributed them. Thus, the giants of American literature
emphasized the intricacies of the message of Sa‘di, Hafiz, and other Persian Sufi
masters but paid little or no attention to the religious tradition to which they
belonged. The search was for that which unifies, and the need to discover the
common humanity and decency of man made it necessary to break the barriers
that religious traditions had imposed upon society.
Exploring other religious and spiritual traditions therefore became the ear-
liest attempt to establish a dialogue among civilizations and create a global village.
The corpus of Sufi poetry available in the 1840s was dramatically increased from
that available at the turn of the century, and would only increase further as the
century continued. By the end of that decade, Persian Sufi poetry had reached
Concord, where the Sufi poets found an audience that appreciated them on
philosophical and religious as well as literary levels. As a community of writers
and intellectuals, the New England writers drew from the same available sources
to produce unique written reactions in the forms of poetry, essays, and letters,
all manifesting a similar attraction to the Persian-inspired ideals of Sufism. The
spiritual landscape of New England spread throughout the rest of America in
the form of inspired movements such as Transcendentalism and Perennialism,
which stated that the Muslim Sa‘di, the Hindu Rabindranath Tagore, and the
other masters of “Eastern” wisdom had access to the same Universal Wisdom
as Emerson and Whitman.
Sufism became entrenched in the American literary and spiritual scenes
in two ways: the scholarly in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
and the popular in the twentieth century. It seems hardly necessary to mention
and nearly impossible to overemphasize the importance of Sir William Jones in
transmitting Oriental history and literature to the West over the course of his
government service in Bengal and Calcutta (1783–1794). The sheer quantity of
information that he communicated back to England and America in the records
of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, the journals Asiatic Researches and Asiatic Miscel-
lany, and in his posthumous collected Works is even more impressive with the
knowledge that he was simultaneously serving as a puisne judge and diplomat in
the service of the East India Company. Jones was well aware of the exhaustion
of neo-Classical poetic themes, images, and forms, and he saw in the poetry of
Hafiz a possible infusion of new passion and spiritual awareness, provided the
lyrics were free from the beleaguered eighteenth-century diction that charac-
terized previous translations of the Divan. One of Jones’s most famous poetic
translations was “A Persian Song,” based on Hafiz’s eighth ghazal and widely
circulated in the Annual Register, Gentleman’s Magazine, Monthly Review, and Town
and Country between 1772 and 1786. He was not the only scholar to bring new
translations of Sufi poetry to the West; he was, however, the most prolific and
4 Mehdi Aminrazavi

most passionate contributor to the corpus of Sufi materials that was available
to poets seeking to represent the Orient at the turn of the nineteenth century.
The German influence was gradual but immense, most notably the work of
famed orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall. He translated Hafiz’s complete
Divan into German in 1812 and 1813 and sent a copy of these translations to
Emerson, who translated them into English (sometimes with such literalness
that they maintain the German word order) and distributed them among the
Concordians who shared his interest in Sufi poetry.
The first popular American publication to include a poem by Hafiz was
The American Museum or Universal Magazine in 1792, which printed, uncredited,
“Ode Translated from the Persian of Hafez,” one of the poems translated by John
Nott in 1787. Though it was preceded by the “Tale of Hafez” included in the
first volume of the New York Magazine or Literary Repository (1790), a story which
starred two men named Hafez and Saadi, those characters were not intended to
represent the poets of Shiraz; they were simply evidence of the name recognition
attributed to symbolic Eastern figures in an imaginative landscape strongly shaped
by the Arabian Nights and other popular Oriental materials. Additionally, the Ori-
ental Translation Fund, founded in 1828 as an arm of the Royal Asiatic Society
of Great Britain and Ireland, supplied scholarly information to American journals
such as the Knickerbocker and the American Monthly Magazine. The society’s most
valued contributions were translations, though the fund also published memoirs,
articles, and other materials of interest to American students of Persian poetry.
Limited by different trade routes that bypassed India and the Near East and a
complete unfamiliarity with the Persian or Arabic languages, American newspa-
pers printed uncredited or pseudonymous translations, and occasionally complete
fabrications, alongside British and French sources such as Sir William Jones and
Sir William Ouseley. As in Britain, Hafiz and Sa‘di proved to be the two most
popular Persian poets, though Edward FitzGerald’s 1868 second edition of The
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam inspired the creation of the Omar Khayyam Club of
London and America as well as a circle of “Omarian Poets,” including Nathan
Haskell Dole and Henry Harman Chamberlin. Also as in Britain, the popularity
of Persian poetry inspired a wave of imitations produced by less notable poets
who did little more than patch together Oriental tropes and Byronic sentiments.
The popular twentieth-century version of Sufism came through such spiri-
tual masters as Inayat Khan, who came to America in the 1930s from India.
From the 1930s to 1950, the Muslim immigration from Lebanon, Syria, and
later Palestine further strengthened the Sufi presence in America. The spiritual
emphasis of the anti-war movement against the Vietnam War created a market
for gurus and spiritual masters to come to America; it is during this period
that Sufi centers (zawiyyah in Arabic and khanaqah in Persian) were established
in major American cities. In the aftermath of the 1978–79 Iranian revolution,
there was a large migration of Iranians to the United States which helped to
 Introduction 5

establish various orders of Persian Sufi tradition. A full survey of the journey
of Sufism to America would be a very interesting work, which however goes
beyond the scope of this volume.
The political dimension of the response to Eastern philosophy and poetry
by the American literary masters of the nineteenth century is also one that must
serve as a subject of future inquiry. However, it seems noteworthy that at a time
when the spirit of colonialism in Europe and America was heavily characterized
by a condescending and even cruel ethnocentrism that declared the “Other”
had nothing to offer, distinguished American scholars called attention to the
profundity of the spiritual fruits of these civilizations. Perhaps these attempts
to revere and respect the wisdom of the so-called inferior races were in part a
subtle method of spiritual protest against the colonialists’ perspective, comparable
to the way in which contrasting the themes of Rumi’s poetry of love against
Osama Bin Laden’s theology of hate toward the West calls to attention the noble
aspects of Islam in the present day.

This volume is divided into three parts. Following a chapter on the English
Romantics as the background for the American literary master’s interest in
Sufism, the first section is devoted to a study of different aspects of Ralph Waldo
Emerson’s relationship with Sufism. The second section explores Walt Whitman’s
mystical writings and his influences, touching on Emerson and Sufism in the
process. Finally, the third section discusses the Sufi influences of other American
Transcendentalists, who were also inspired by earlier figures like Emerson.
The first essay, Leonard Lewisohn’s “English Romantic and Persian Sufi
Poets: The Wellspring of Inspiration for American Transcendentalists,” does not
concern the Transcendentalists directly, but provides an invaluable introduction
to the root themes and images that underlie all poetry written by poets with
Neoplatonic influences, including Sufis, Romantics, and Transcendentalists. Like
the Romantic poets, the Sufi masters with whom they were acquainted worked
with a common set of symbols that Lewisohn describes as “publicly hermetic,
so that all writers and readers of Sufi poetry quickly understood its celebrated
set of ‘esoteric signs.’ ” Part of the aim of these symbols was to introduce the
language of human love and physical experience as a counterpoint to the dis-
cursive and abstract language upon which mystical poetry relied to describe
otherwise indescribable experiences. Well-suited to Romantic temperaments,
Hafiz in particular was unmatched in the Sufi literature for his lyrics on love
and wine. Hafiz was particularly revered in India, where Sir William Jones drew
most of the material that introduced the West to Eastern culture and literature.
Lewisohn traces examples of this and similar themes, including those of mysti-
cal death and carpe diem, between the works of British Romantic poets Percy
6 Mehdi Aminrazavi

Bysshe Shelley and William Blake, and Sufi poets Rumi and Hafiz, providing
insight into the little-explored relationship between Sufism and the Romantic
poets as well as establishing the artistic and thematic framework occupied by
the Transcendentalists later on in America.
In the first section, Ralph Waldo Emerson is given the title of “Master” for
the seriousness of his commitment to Sufi doctrine, and his pervasive influence
on so many other writers. These essays illustrate Emerson’s conflicted relation-
ship with exoteric Islam, his serious interest in Persian Sufi masters, and his use
of the “Orient” as a framework and vocabulary to align himself with the kind
of spiritual universe he yearned for all his life. They also emphasize the crucial
role he played in publicizing and popularizing Sufi poetry. Emerson did not
publish his first volume of verse until he was 43, but between the ages of 40
and 55 he read and was constantly inspired by the work of Sa‘di in particular.
He even translated over 700 lines of Persian verses, often from the German, in
the free versification tradition of the eighteenth century, often adding rhyme and
regularizing rhythm in order to achieve a deliberate poetic sensibility. Silently,
he sometimes combined fragments of different ghazals in passages intended for
publication, or his own translations with those of von Hammer-Purgstall.
Mansur Ekhtiyar considers these and other aspects of Emerson’s back-
ground in his essay “Chronological Development of Emerson’s Interest in Persian
Mysticism,” in which he traces the gradual development of Emerson’s interest
in Eastern thought in general, and in Islamic and Persian mysticism specifically.
Beginning with Emerson’s college years, Ekhtiyar unravels how Emerson became
interested in Hindu and Zoroastrian thought first, and then, through English
and German translations of such Persian Sufi poets as Hafiz and Sa‘di, came to
develop an intense interest in Islamic mysticism. In his Works, the Essays, and
the Journals, Emerson’s enthusiasm for the Eastern use of imagery and symbolism
is evident, although he consistently struggles with the Islamic sense of fatalism
he found in Sufism. Still, the struggle did not prevent him from expounding
upon Hafiz’s use of “wine” or playing with the notions of solitude and exile.
In the next chapter, Marwan M. Obeidat takes a more analytical approach
to the eminent Transcendentalist. Marking Emerson’s interest in Oriental thought
“as the beginning of interest in comparative religion in America,” the author
offers an insightful analysis of Emerson’s uneasy and conflicted relationship with
Islamic mysticism. While Emerson remained intensely interested in Oriental
thought to the end, Obeidat shows how the poet’s Western mindset still consid-
ered the Occidental identity superior; as Emerson himself asserted, “Orientalism
is Fatalism, resignation: Occidentalism is Freedom and will.” This chapter also
suggests that Platonism and Neoplatonism provided a common language with
which the American Romantics understood and related to Islamic mysticism.
The following essay, Parvin Loloi’s “Emerson and Aspects of Sa‘di’s Recep-
tion in America,” primarily concerns the means by which Emerson became
 Introduction 7

acquainted with Sufism and Persian mystical literature, and the poems of Sa‘di in
particular. Emerson became aware of Sufism when he was only eleven years old,
but it was not until he became acquainted with German and French translations
that his interest grew and matured into scholarly thought. His preoccupation
with these translations both influenced his own transcendentalist sentiments and
gave him a preexisting yet flexible linguistic framework to express them. As
demonstrated in the autobiographical poem “Saadi” (1842), which Loloi quotes
in full, Emerson came to identify Sa‘di as the ideal poet, as well as an aspect of
himself. In analyzing the poem, Loloi also traces its Romantic elements, includ-
ing an emphasis on nature and its relation to “divine essence.” Loloi affirms the
role that Plantonism and Neoplatonism played in interesting the Romantics in
Oriental literature. Neoplatonism in particular made it possible for a common
discourse and metaphysical language to emerge, as the author explores in the
latter part of her essay.
The influence of Hafiz on Emerson is the subject of the next chapter.
Farhang Jahanpour’s essay, “Emerson on Hafiz and Sa‘di: The Narrative of Love
and Wine,” is divided into four sections. In the first section, Jahanpour traces
Emerson’s interest in Persian poetry from his exposure as a teenager to the
poetry of Sa‘di, Hafiz, and Jami, to his more mature encounters with Firdawsi
and Sa‘di’s Gulistan. The second section discusses the German translations that
served as guides to Hafiz’s difficult esoteric language, and quotes passages from
Emerson’s Journals in which he expresses sincere appreciation of Hafiz’s poetry.
The third section focuses on Emerson’s own translations; of the approximately
700 lines of Persian poetry he translated into English, about half of them are
from the work of Hafiz. Although Emerson’s dedication to the translations is
unquestioned, his faithfulness to the originals varies; often, he attempted a literal
translation, while other times he mixed poems together or elaborated upon them
himself. The article ends with a section that traces the echoes of Hafiz’s poems
in Emerson’s writings, both Oriental and involving other subject matter. This
section features some of Emerson’s own renditions of Hafiz’s poems in English
and compares them to the original Persian.
Whitman existed in the same cultural milieu that saw Ralph Waldo Emer-
son embrace Sufi poetry to justify his own belief in self-reliance by reinterpreting
Sa‘di’s didacticism and libertarian sentiments into a doctrine of democracy and
self-equality in Nature. Whitman saw evidence of divinity in the most com-
monplace people and objects, and celebrated the material world as part of the
divine Logos and as proof of the underlying humanity in a nation that was
increasingly divided by sectional differences. Like Hafiz, Whitman also accepted
the ineffability topos that implicitly accompanied all Sufi mystical poetry. The
interpretation of Walt Whitman as a mystical poet gained popularity among
scholars in the 1960s. “He is the one mystical writer of any consequence America
has produced,” Karl Shapiro wrote, “the poet of the greatest achievement.”1
8 Mehdi Aminrazavi

Eastern mysticism in particular seemed to resonate with Whitman, as V. K. Chari

and T. R. Rajasekharaiah have examined at length using Hindu and Buddhist
texts. Based on comparisons between poems and the contents of Whitman’s
unpublished journals and notes, Rajasekharaiah concludes persuasively that the
poet was in fact well-read on the subject of Vedantic philosophy by the end of
his life, though his understanding of Eastern mysticism was likely more intuitive
than academic when the first edition of Leaves of Grass was published in 1855.
The next series of essays, grouped under the title “The Disciple: Walt
Whitman,” is meant to acknowledge the idea that the same connection between
poet and philosophy holds true of Whitman and Sufism as well. The traditional
starting point from which to test this connection is Ralph Waldo Emerson,
the main conduit of Sufi poetry into the Transcendentalist literary community.
Whitman was an avid reader of Emerson, and would in all likelihood have read
the poem “Saadi” when it was published in 1842. Additionally, the influence of
Hafiz is quite clear in Emerson’s 1848 poem Bacchus, though it is not a direct
translation of a Hafiz sonnet. Whitman may also have read the series of “Ethi-
cal Scriptures” from the sacred books of the Orient that Emerson and Thoreau
published in The Dial in 1842 and 1843, or the translations of several fragments
of mystical poetry that Emerson provided The Atlantic Monthly and The Liberty
Bell in 1851. Like Emerson, Whitman found his path to Sufism through German
translations of Persian poetry, and various Sufi doctrines, such as the annihilation
of the Self in God (fana’ fi’llah), had a deep effect on his life and work. In the
first essay of this section, Mahnaz Ahmad, in “Whitman and Hafiz: Expressions
of Universal Love and Tolerance,” presents a biographical and analytical study
and also illustrates Whitman’s own concept of love, as depicted in the character
of the “graybeard Sufi” in his poem “A Persian Lesson,” alongside Ahmad’s own
exquisite translations of Hafiz’s difficult ghazals.
Massud Farzan continues the study of Whitman in the essay “Whitman and
Sufism: Towards ‘A Persian Lesson.’ ” Farzan compares the mystical experiences
Whitman evokes in writings such as “Song of Myself,” and “A Persian Lesson”
to the Sufi concept of ecstasy, especially as explored in some of Rumi’s poetry.
Whether it is in Sa‘di’s Gulistan or Rumi’s Mathnavi, “argument, abstraction, and
getting stuck in logistics are anathema to Whitman and Persian poet-mystics
alike,” Farzan states. The chapter continues with a discussion of Whitman and
Sufi concepts of the self, wherein the selfish “I” is juxtaposed with the divine
“thou,” and concludes with the idea of the mystical death of the self and unity
with God.
In the next essay, Arthur Versluis discusses other authors in his “ ‘Islamic’
Magic and Mysticism of Thomas Lake Harris, Lawrence Oliphant, and Paschal
Beverly.” He uses a biographical approach to highlight the similarities between
three notable figures involved in both the American Transcendentalist and indig-
enous esoteric traditions of other religions. Thomas Lake Harris’ work reflects
 Introduction 9

aspects of Sufism, even though his direct familiarity with the “Sufi tradition” was
nebulous at best. The case of Laurence Oliphant is different, for his travel to the
Middle East and Palestine in particular may well have put him in contact with
an array of Sufi groups. Oliphant specifically references Druze, whom he calls
the “Druse,” a splinter Shi’ite group with a strong esoteric orientation. Finally,
Versluis compares the experiences of Paschal Beverly Randolph, who also trav-
eled to the Middle East and claimed contact with some of the more esoteric
and mystical orders. Versluis questions the legitimacy of some of their teachings,
but notes that whether it came in the form of intimate knowledge of esoteric
traditions or simply a projection of what they imagined such traditions to entail,
the influence of Sufism and its themes on these three figures was considerable.
The next essay, by John D. Yohannan, focuses on a number of specific
figures who were primarily disciples of Emerson: Thoreau, Whitman, Longfel-
low, Lowell, Melville, and Lafcadio Hearn. Each of these figures made a serious
literary investment in studying Oriental mysticism, although for some the allure
was stronger than for others. Thoreau, for instance, echoed Emerson’s identifica-
tion with Sa‘di: “I know, for instance, that Saadi entertained once identically the
same thought that I do, and thereafter I can find no essential difference between
Saadi and myself. He is not Persian, he is not ancient, he is not strange to me.”2
This more exaggerated assessment stems from Thoreau’s limited understanding
of Persian poetry. Less well-read than Emerson, he cared about the ideas them-
selves, not their sources, and it mattered little to him whether the poetry that
expressed Sufi wisdom was well-translated or entirely fraudulent. Nor was he
above deliberately misinterpreting Sa‘di’s aphorisms to suit his own philosophical
agenda. Yet, however far from traditional Sufi doctrine, the expansive, subjec-
tive philosophy of Sufism allowed for such interpretations on his part, as well
as on the parts of other Transcendentalists. Yohannon also examines authors of
less renown, including Amos Bronson Alcott, whose interest in Eastern wisdom
led him to Sa‘di and Firdawsi, and William Rounesville Alger, whose anthol-
ogy The Poetry of the Orient (1856) served as an invaluable source of informa-
tion for Walt Whitman, and which indicates the extent of his fascination with
Sa‘di, Hafiz, and other Persian Sufi masters. Yohannan also mentions Moncure
Daniel Conway, a second-generation Transcendentalist who helped establish a
link between the American and English devotees of Persian Literature and was
instrumental in drawing attention to Omar Khayyam. The rest of the essay is
devoted to Longfellow, Lowell, Melville, and Lafcadio Hearn, and shows their
indebtedness to Emerson while quoting specific Sufi texts that helped shape
their mystical orientation.
The next essay, Philip N. Edmondson’s “The Persians of Concord,” exam-
ines how the city of Concord became the locus of Transcendentalist writers,
attracting literary minds such as Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry
David Thoreau, George William Curtis, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edmondson
10 Mehdi Aminrazavi

also elaborates on how transcendentalism utilized a similar ideology and set of

themes similar to that of Romanticism as a preestablished linguistic framework
to communicate Muslim mystical concepts.
In the final essay, Mehdi Aminrazavi traces the impact of Omar Khayyam’s
Ruba‘iyyat upon an American audience. Khayyam was a polarizing poet: he was
elevated to the level of prophet by some and demoted to that of demon by others.
He gained immense popularity among the New England literary circles shortly
after the 1859 publication of FitzGerald’s exquisite rendition of the Ruba‘iyyat.
The Omar Khayyam Club of America was formed in 1900 as an opportunity for
literary figures to celebrate the great Persian sage, and produced a small school
of Omarian poets. Even though Omar Khayyam was not a Sufi in the strictest
sense of the word, his Ruba‘iyyat were understood to espouse the same esoteric
Eastern wisdom that American audiences perceived in the Sufi mystical poets.
Aminrazavi shows the extent of his influence, both among less famous literary
figures and more notable authors like Mark Twain, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound.
Mark Twain refers to the “wise old Omar Khayyam” for the first time in
1876, yet his life-long interest in the author of the Ruba‘iyyat is well-known.
Alan Gribben, in his essay “Bond Slave to FitzGerald’s Omar: Mark Twain and
the Ruba‘iyyat,” brings to light this little-known influence of Twain’s and provides
helpful context for understanding the place the Ruba‘iyyat occupied in Twain’s
personal and poetic life. The sense of rebellion against the cruelty of life in the
Ruba‘iyyat resonated with Twain in the face of his own hardships. Gribben ends
with a selected number of Twain’s more burlesque Ruba‘iyyat, while the complete
version of the poems follows in the next chapter.

The original idea for this volume arose from a discussion with colleagues on
the lack of a single volume highlighting the reception of Islamic mysticism by
the academy, and the difficulty of accounting for increasing interest in Sufism
after the turn of the nineteenth century. While there are many books dealing
with the current interest in Sufi literature, particularly in the context of such
popular authors as Rumi and Hafiz, there is no notable work on the historical
background of Sufism’s enthusiastic reception by eminent masters of classical
American literature. It is hoped that including a variety of essays that bring
together figures of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American liter-
ary scene in a single volume will make this an important contribution to the
understanding of the complex web of ideological similarities that existed between
Islamic mysticism and American Transcendentalism. Even without Emerson’s
background in the terminology and available translations of Persian poetry, the
often-contradictory themes of mystical ecstasy, Oriental serenity, the divinely
intoxicated intellect, and love for the emancipation of Soul—just to name a few
 Introduction 11

of Emerson’s favorites—would have appealed to poetic imaginations such as those

of Whitman and Thoreau. The use of the language of human love as a cipher
for mystical knowledge of the Divine, the revelation of a new moral code as
evidence of otherwise ineffable experiences, and the importance of embracing
and transcending the physical world all find eloquent expression in the poetry
of Emerson, Whitman, and a multitude of other writers, but they attain even
greater clarity when compared to similar philosophical concepts illustrated by
the Sufi masters.
Today, their interest lives on in the form of continued interest in Sufi
poetry and prose, and it is thanks to the works of early masters of American
literature that translations of Rumi have remained among the best-selling works
of poetry in the last decade in America.
It should be noted that for historical reasons, I have left the transliterations
of names and phrases in Persian and Arabic by the nineteenth-century American
authors, as they have used them, which are often transliterated incorrectly. I have
provided the correct transliterations in the glossary at the end of the volume.
Finally, I would like to express my debt of gratitude to a number of people
who assisted me in preparing this volume. I am grateful to Dr. Leonard Lewisohn
for his invaluable suggestions regarding the choice of articles and contributors.
I would particularly like to thank my research assistant, Annie Kinniburgh, for
her thorough reading of this manuscript and extensive editorial suggestions.
Her recently completed thesis listed in the Bibliography provided me with new
information which I found to be very helpful in recasting of the introduction.
I am grateful to Dr. Robert H. Hirst and the Mark Twain Project at the
Bancroft Library of the University of California in Berkeley for granting me
the permission to print all of the Ruba‘iyyat of Mark Twain.

Mehdi Aminrazavi
April 2014

Notes

  1. J. E. Miller, K. Shapiro, and B. Slote, Start With the Sun: Studies in Cosmic Poetry
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960), 58.
 2. Henry David Thoreau, Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, ed. Bradford Torrey and
Francis H. Allen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), vol. IV, 48.
The English Romantic Background
 1

English Romantics and Persian Sufi Poets

A Wellspring of Inspiration for
American Transcendentalists1

Leonard Lewisohn

Platonism in Romantic and Sufi Poetry

Cross-cultural studies focusing on comparative mysticism between Muslim Sufi

and Western poets have been seldom made; when made, have seldom been
successful.2 Despite this, homologies both of content and intent in the verse of
the classical Persian Sufi poets and the English Metaphysical and later Romantic
poets are clearly present insofar as a huge common intellectual ground between
both poetic traditions exists. The closest corresponding school of English poetry
to Persian Sufi poetic imagery, aside from the Romantics, is that of the Meta-
physical—Neoplatonic and Meditative—poets of the seventeenth century such
as Donne, Marvell, Herbert, Crashaw, Traherne, and Vaughn.3 The fraternity of
Poetic Genius between the Sufis and Romantics is not only animated by the
metaphysics of the Imagination, as Henry Corbin’s researches have shown,4 but
grounded in the mutually shared Platonism and Neoplatonism nurturing both
poetic traditions, not to mention many similar metaphysical worldviews, cosmog-
onies, theoerotic, and ethical doctrines which Christianity and Islam hold in com-
mon and which transcend their exoteric theological divergences (such as Islam’s
rejection of the Christian dogmas of the Incarnation, Trinity, and Crucifixion).
Regarding Platonism and Neoplatonism in particular, before attempting
any comparison it should be underlined that there is far less known about
the literary history of the Platonic tradition in mediæval Islam than there is
about it in Christianity. For instance, not one single Persian Sufi poet has ever
directly quoted a Platonic dialogue to my knowledge.5 “It remains difficult to

15
16 Leonard Lewisohn

say just how much of Plato, whether in integral translation or in epitomes,” F.

E. Peters underlines, “the medieval Muslim actually possessed. No Arabic ver-
sion of a Platonic dialogue has been preserved.”6 This stands in direct contrast
to the situation found among the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
English Romantics, nearly all of whom were immersed in the actual study of
Plato’s dialogues and studied him in the original Greek. Almost all of the main
English Romantic poets were steeped in Plato, which they read in Greek, and
Neoplatonic commentaries on Plato written in Latin.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), for instance, whose rendition of Plato’s
Symposium from Greek to English is a superb work of prose translation,7 was one
of the most erudite scholars of Greek history, literature, and poetry of his day.
When translating the Symposium, Shelley kept Marsilio Ficino’s commentary in
Latin on it—probably the most influential work of the Renaissance on romantic
and divine love—constantly at his side.8 For years, Shelley had immersed himself
in Thomas Taylor’s translations of Plato.9 As James Notopoulos has exhaustively
demonstrated in his monumental work on The Platonism of Shelley,10 Shelley was
a poeta doctus who knew in depth and detail the precise metaphysical references
of his romantic imagery. In addition to his Platonic studies, Shelley was also
well versed in Indian, Kabbalistic, and Hermetic works of metaphysical gnosis.
More importantly for this essay, he also influenced by Persian Sufi poetry, hav-
ing composed imitations of some of the ghazals of Hafiz.11 It is thus entirely
in order to compare his type of Platonic hermeticism with traditions of Islamic
gnosis found in poets of the Persian Sufi tradition.
The same pattern emerges with all the other English Romantic poets.
Coleridge as a schoolboy had read the Neoplatonists in the writings of Thomas
Taylor the Platonist, the first translator of Plato into the English language during
the last two decades of the eighteenth century. In his own writings he frequently
cites Plato and Neoplatonic texts in the original Greek.12 Keats likewise was
steeped in Thomas Taylor’s translations. William Blake was a personal friend of
Thomas Taylor; in fact, he was so intimate with Taylor’s translations of Plato
that some of the speeches made by the gods in his Prophetic Books paraphrase
Taylor’s commentary on Plato’s dialogues, myths, and symbols exactly.13 Blake
was especially attentive to Taylor’s translations of Plotinus’s Tractates, which he
illustrated in his paintings and verse. The American Transcendentalists, who were
largely inspired by Romantic philosophy,14 were all well-versed in Plato’s writ-
ings: Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman knew their Phaedo, Phaedrus, Republic and
Symposium, not to mention Pythagoras, Iamblichus, and Plotinus, quite well.15
Of course, it would be a gross simplification of the cultural complexity of
the Romantic sensibility to say that the religious and philosophical influences
on the Romantics were limited to, or even largely defined by Platonism or
Neoplatonism, since the terrain for Romantic poetics was based on a number
of other pietistic and theosophical undercurrents of the Enlightenment.16 Yet
 English Romantics and Persian Sufi Poets 17

the fact remains that, despite the difference in the reception-history of Plato in
the Christian West and Muslim Persia (which no one should overlook when
attempting a comparative understanding of these civilizations), Plato’s thought and
Neoplatonism are the most important part of the mutual philosophical heritage shared by
these Christian Romantic and Muslim Persian Sufi poets and mystics.
Given the temporal span of five centuries separating the classical Persian
Sufi poets from the Romantics, the geographical distance that separates Persia
from Europe and North America, the varieties and differences in the reception
history of Platonism in Islam and Christianity, not to mention theological diver-
gences between the eminent poeta theologi in both traditions, it might appear that
the pursuit of parallels and convergences between Sufis and Romantics is a kind
of quest for the horn of a unicorn. However, this is not the case and there today
exists a small but important coterie of authors, such as Luce Lopez-Baralt, Maria
Rosa Menocal, Parvin Loloi, and Massud Farzan,17 who have already charted
some of the correspondences that do exist with much success. In their writings
the presence of such correspondences, heretofore largely intuitively appreciated,
have received solid scholarly substantiation.

Comparative Persian–English Poetics:

Archetypal and Anagogic Criticism

Northrop Frye provides us with two important theoretical approaches to com-

parative literature that offer useful tools to explore and expose the common
ground between the two schools of poets separated by so much time and
space. He delineates these approaches as comprising, respectively, “archetypal” and
“anagogic criticism.” “Archetypal criticism” is described as tracing the associative
clusters of symbols within a body of literature, in which the critic is essentially
concerned with a poem’s “relationship to the rest of literature.”18 This type of
criticism explores poetry’s communicable symbols and conventions in order “to
fit poems into the body of poetry as a whole.”19 Archetypal criticism, which
involves the “study of literary symbols as parts of a whole,”20 applied to the
study of Persian Sufi poetry, is concerned with, for instance, the elaboration and
expression of the technical terms (istilahat) of Sufi symbolism in poetry.21 The
Sufi symbolic lexicon was publicly hermetic, so that all writers and readers of
Sufi poetry quickly understood its celebrated set of “esoteric signs”—images,
metaphors—used by poets, spelled out in detail, for example, in the classical
commentaries on Shabistari’s Garden of Mystery (Gulshan-i raz)22 or in traditional
mystical exegeses on the Divan of Hafiz.23 From the standpoint of comparative
literature, at this level of criticism it is difficult to make any valid comparisons
between Western Romantics and the Sufis since often their respective uses of
poetic symbols and signs are quite different. The topoi of the cypress and the
18 Leonard Lewisohn

narcissus, for instance, have entirely opposite symbolic meanings in Persian Sufi
and in English Classical and Romantic poetry. However, even on this level one
can still find certain archetypal themes that pervade both traditions.
One of the most obvious of these is carpe diem. From the perspective of
archetypal criticism, carpe diem is a common, universal, grand theme that pervades
classical English literature as well as ancient Egyptian, Greek (e.g., Aeschylus),
Latin (e.g., Horace, Catullus), Renaissance Italian (e.g., Lorenzo de Medici), San-
skrit, and Persian poetry.24 Indeed, virtually all of the world’s literatures contain
similar expressions of this timeless idea. Consider, for instance, the sentiment
expressed by this quatrain by ‘Umar Khayyam (d. c. 1132), quoted here from
Fitzgerald’s translation—which for once follows the Persian original25 closely
enough to make the comparison valid:

Ah! Fill the cup: what boots it to repeat

How time is slipping underneath our feet:
Unborn Tomorrow, and dead yesterday,
Why fret about them if today be sweet!26

Between this quatrain and the following poem attributed to Henry David Tho-
reau, itself entitled Carpe Diem, an exact homology exists:

Build not on tomorrow

But seize on today
From no future borrow
The present to pay
The task of the present
Be sure to fulfil
If sad or if pleasant
Be true to it still
God sendeth us sorrow
And cloudeth our day
His sun on it morrow
Shines bright on our way.27

Both Khayyam and Thoreau encourage their readers to cloud not their delight
in the present moment with melancholic reveries about the brevity of life. At
the same time both poets express in nearly identical terms the same archetypal
theme of the perception of the eternal within the transitory.
Another common archetypal theme that the Sufi poets shared with
Romantic poets is the ethical teaching that salvation lies in overlooking the
faults in one’s neighbours and in “seeing no evil,” which appears to be held in
common both as a tenet of moral philosophy and an insight based on poetic
 English Romantics and Persian Sufi Poets 19

intuition. Blake’s view that abstaining from censure of one’s neighbours leads to
salvation in this verse:

Mutual forgiveness of each vice

Such are the Gates of Paradise.28

is identical in spirit and substance to Hafiz’s doctrine that salvation lies in finding
no fault and seeing no evil expressed in his famous verse:

I said to the master of the tavern: “Which road is

The road of salvation?” He called for wine and said,
“Not revealing the faults of other people.”29

Above and beyond the comparison of such grand archetypal themes, there
is another literary approach that Frye calls “anagogic criticism.” Viewed from
the anagogic perspective, almost all such comparisons now make much better
sense because this approach allows us to transcend all civilization-specific and
ethnocentric interpretations of literature and discern the “universal symbols”
underlying the exoteric literary archetypes. Frye thus explains that “in the ana-
gogic phase, literature imitates the total dream of man, and so imitates the thought
of a human mind which is at the circumference and not at the center of its
reality. . . . When we pass into anagogy, nature becomes, not the container, but
the thing contained, and the archetypal universal symbols, the city, the garden,
the quest, the marriage, are no longer the desirable forms that man constructs
inside nature, but are themselves the forms of nature.30 ‘Attar understood this
well when he sang:

Both earth and heaven must fit within your own soul
If on love’s path you’d be distinguished and unique.
‘Attar, could you but free yourself in toto from your ‘self,’
All ninefold cobalt vaults of heaven will find place within your
soul!31

Andrew Marvell referred to the same phenomenon when he spoke of

. . . The mind, that Ocean where each kind

Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas. . . . 

At the anagogic level, the writer becomes a seer who is “caught up into
the life of the Universe,” as Emerson well understood in his essay on “The
20 Leonard Lewisohn

Poet”—“his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are univer-
sally intelligible as the plants and animals.” Such a poet “has yielded us a new
thought  .  .  .  unlocks our chains, and admits us to a new scene. This emancipation
is dear to all men, and the power to impart it, as it must come from greater
depth and scope of thought, is a measure of intellect. Therefore all books of
imagination endure, all which ascend to that truth, that the writer sees nature
beneath him, and uses it as his exponent. . . . All the religions of the world are
the ejaculations of a few imaginative men.”32 The universe of the anagoge, Frye
continues, is not to be “contained within any actual civilization or set of moral
values, for the same reason that no structure of imagery can be restricted to
one allegorical interpretation. . . . The ethos of art is no longer a group of char-
acters within a natural setting, but a universal man who is also a divine being,
or a divine being conceived in anthropomorphic terms. The form of literature
most deeply influenced by the anagogic phase is the scripture or apocalyptic
revelation.”33 A good example of the unity of the microcosm and macrocosm
within that “universal man,” as Frye calls it here, appears in Blake’s Four Zoas:

. . . Man looks out in tree & herb & fish & bird & beast
Collecting up the scatter’d portions of his immortal body
Into the Elemental forms of everything that grows.
. . . In pain he sighs, in pain he labours in his universe
Screaming in birds over the deep, & howling in the wolf
Over the slain, & moaning in the cattle & in the winds . . .
And in the cries of birth & in the groans of death his voice
Is heard throughout the Universe: wherever a grass grows
Or a leaf buds, The Eternal Man is seen, is heard, is felt
And all his sorrows, till he resumes his ancient bliss.34

Frye’s use of word “anagoge” here was derived from the medieval Biblical
Christian hermeneutics, according to which there existed a fourfold meaning
to Scripture: literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical.35 In Islam, a very similar
theory, propounding that four levels of meaning existed within the Qur’ān,36
was advanced; thus Prophet said that “The Koran has an outer sense (zahiri), an
inner sense (batini), a tropological sense (haddi), and an anagogic sense (matla‘i),
which itself further extends unto seven, nine and seventy inner senses.”37 Both
in medieval Christian poetics,38 and in classical Sufi poetics, therefore, not only
God’s word in the revelation of divine scripture, but inspired poetry could be
thus read as polysemous works hiding higher parabolic senses.39 M. D. Chenu,
in his Nature, Man, and Society in the 12th Century, in describing “The Symbolist
Mentality” of Christian Neoplatonism, reveals that: “this upwards reference of
things—this anagoge—was constituted precisely by their natural dynamism as
 English Romantics and Persian Sufi Poets 21

symbols. The image of the transcendent was not some pleasant addition to their
natures; rather, rooted in the ‘dissimilar similitudes’ of the hierarchical ladder,
it was their very reality and reason for being.”40 He notes that the anagogic
approach to symbols was “essentially a method of approach to intelligible reality,
not an explanation of the world of sense by means of that reality. [It was] an
ascent that began from the lowest material level, on which the mind of man
found its connatural objects—objects whose value for knowledge, for sacred
knowledge, lay not in their coarse material natures but in their symbolic capacity,
their ‘anagogy.’ ”41 Thus Coleridge believed that without “symbolical” perception,
one merely lives a world of shadows:

For all that meets the bodily sense I deem

Symbolical, one mighty alphabet
For infant minds; and we in this low world
Place with our backs to bright Reality
That we may learn with young unwounded ken
The substance from the shadow.42

This is of course the same thing that Mircea Eliade meant when he
noted that for homo religiosus all of nature is a cosmic hierophany.43 Persian Sufi
poetics understood the anagogic references of images and metaphors to be of
quintessential importance. Interpreting “The Philosophy of Persian Art,” Ananda
Coomaraswamy reveals how “anagogic values can be read” in all Persian works
of art, for “the divine Artist is thought of now as an architect, now as a painter,
or potter, or embroiderer; and just as none of His works is meaningless or use-
less, so no one makes pictures . . . without an intention.”44 This is what Sa‘di
meant, for example, in the following verse from his Bustan:

That student of weaving spoke well as he wove

The shapes of the elephant, phoenix, giraffe . . . 
“My own hand it’s not that configures these forms,
Except if the Maker above for me weave them first.”45

Sa‘di here versifies Plato’s doctrine enunciated in the Symposium and Phaedrus
that the arts are but phantom reflections and shadows of the Forms of Ideal
Beauty and the progeny of Heavenly Love.46 In his essay, “The Poet,” Emerson
thus quotes Spenser’s famous stanza in The Faerie Queen which teaches that the
soul makes the body:

So every spirit, as it is most pure,

And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
22 Leonard Lewisohn

So it the fairer body doth procure

To habit in, and it more fairly dight,
With cheerful grace and amiable sight.
For, of the soul, and body form doth take,
For soul is form, and doth the body make.47

In Prometheus Unbound Shelley too had set this same doctrine to verse:

And lovely apparitions,—dim at first,

Then radiant, as the mind arising bright
From the embrace of beauty (whence the forms
Of which these are phantoms) casts on them
The gathered rays which are reality—
Shall visit us, the progeny immortal
Of Painting, Sculpture, and rapt Poesy,
And arts, though unimagined, yet to be . . .48

Therefore, on the anagogic level the theological, religious and cultural dis-
tinctions that otherwise separate the Persian Sufi from the English Romantic poets
evaporate and leave not a rack behind, insofar as literature at this level, to quote
Frye again, is viewed as “existing in its own universe, no longer a commentary on
life or reality, but containing life and reality in a system of verbal relationships.”49
That is because at this phase, as Frye says, for the poet, “only religion or something
as infinite in its range as religion, can possibly form an external goal.”50

Anagogic Correspondences Between

Sufi and Romantic Poetry

At this juncture it will be asked: how exactly “anagogic criticism” may enable us
to better grasp the correspondences between Sufi and Romantic poetry? Below,
six anagogic themes found in both Sufi and Romantic poetry will be exam-
ined—Carpe diem, Nunc aeternum, Mundus imaginalis, Annihilation and Mystical
Death (fana’), the Earthly Mirror of Divine Beauty in the Eternal Feminine, and
the Unity of Religions—and an attempt to disclose some of the allusive anagogic
correspondences between the two poetic traditions will be made.

Carpe Diem

If from the anagogic perspective we approach now the same theme of c­arpe
diem discussed above, we find correspondences that are entirely different from
what archetypal criticism had yielded us. Here, the theme of carpe diem becomes
an expression of the poet’s realization of the nunc aeternum, which in Sufism
 English Romantics and Persian Sufi Poets 23

is termed “metaphysical time” (waqt 51): the Eternal Now transcending dull,
horizontal, serial temporality, beyond our personal obsession with events future
or past, living within the presence of “Eternity’s sunrise” which sustains “the
moment as it flies” as Blake understood. Instead of considering carpe diem
merely as a universal literary theme, we now contemplate it as expressing an
anagogic truth about the higher vertical reality of the interface of Time with
Eternity. Remarkably, we also discover that the Persian Sufi poets’ anagogic
conception of carpe diem is expressed in almost precisely the same way it is
by the English Romantics Blake and Shelley, or for that matter, in exactly the
same way that Ralph Waldo Emerson’s approached the songs of Hafiz which
he translated (from the German albeit) in a manner that has been accurately
described by one commentator as a “spiritual carpe diem.”52 However, it will
be impossible to clarify the anagogic sense of carpe diem without examining
the anagogic reality of the concept itself and entering into the realm of the
Eternal Now.

Nunc Aeternum

Several quite clear expressions of the transcendence of serial time in the eternal
moment in Persian Sufi poetry can be found in the poetry of Shabistari (d. after
1340) and Hafiz’s (d. 1389) Divan. In the introduction to his Garden of Mystery,
Shabistari describes his experience of the “metaphysical moment of time” (waqt)
as being transported outside of serial time, during which he was able to compose
his whole poem in an hour or so:

So after all their earnest pleas

that I compose a reply in verse
I started out with this response.
With words exact I knit quite terse,
concise a text. I wrote
these words in just a moment’s space
among a throng of men all free of ties,
—I took no pause to think, without
reflection or any repetition, it all flowed out. . . .53

In another of his poems, he clarified the mystical doctrine underlying the

moment of poetic inspirations as follows:

What spiritual vision (nazar) senses

in a breath of mystic consciousness
no pen can write in the space of fifty years.
Nor in a moment’s span can anyone write
What treading the way takes years to teach.54
24 Leonard Lewisohn

In his poem “Milton,” William Blake describes in similar terms exactly the same
phenomenon of trans-temporal poetic inspiration, where the poet realizes the
“eternal now” of “metaphysical time”—

Every Time less than a pulsation of the artery

Is equal in its period & value to Six Thousand Years
For in this Period the Poet’s Work is done, and all the Great
Events of Time start forth & are conceiv’d in such a Period,
Within a Moment, a Pulsation of the Artery.55

Blake penned numerous descriptions of metaphysical time, which he called the

moment of inspiration, asserting, for instance, later on in the same poem, that:

There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find,

Nor can his Watch Fiend find it; but the Industrious find
This Moment & it multiply, & when it once is found,
It renovates every Moment of the Day if rightly placed.56

In his poem on erotic mystical love, Epipsychidion, which, as Notopoulos states,

best manifests “the complex nature of Shelley’s Platonism,”57 the poet recounts
how the metaphysical moment, rightly opened and amplified, can fill each day
with fresh inspiration:

Mind from its object differs most in this:

Evil from good, misery from happiness;
The baser from the nobler; the impure
And frail, from what is clear and must endure.
If you divide suffering and dross, you may
Diminish till it is consumed away;
If you divide pleasure and love and thought,
Each part exceeds the whole; and we know not
How much, while any yet remains unshared,
Of pleasure may be gained, of sorrow spared.
This truth is that deep well, whence sages draw
The unevied light of hope; the eternal law
By which those live, to whom this world of life
Is as a garden ravaged, and whose strife
Tills for the promise of a later birth
The wilderness of this Elysian earth.58

In these verses the poet had based himself on Proclus’s Elements of Theology, prop-
ositions 26–27 which taught that “in giving rise to the effect the cause remains
undiminished and unaltered,”59 and Diotima’s doctrine of love, according to
 English Romantics and Persian Sufi Poets 25

which, as Socrates in the Symposium narrates, the vision of supreme intellectual

beauty is “eternal, unproduced and indestructible; neither subject to increase nor
decay . . . All other things are beautiful through participation of it, with these
conditions, that although they are subject to production and decay, it never
becomes more or less, or endures any change.”60
But Shelley’s verses also speak of the spiritual elongation of moments of
“pleasure and love and thought” by which the quality of the transient and tem-
poral is itself deepened by the “light of hope.” Similarly, the Sufis celebrate that
spiritual carpe diem, which is the knowledge or gnosis of time, called waqt-shinasi,
as Hafiz expounds in this verse:

Rise and come! Those cognizant of time, earth and heaven sell
freely
For an idol’s company and a cup of drossless wine.61

Elsewhere, in his dramatic poem Hellas, Shelley gives the following description
of the nunc aeternum, the Eternal Now which encompasses the past, present and
future, as narrated by Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew (who corresponds to Khid.r
in the Sufi tradition62):

All is contained in each.

Dodona’s forest to an acorn’s cup
Is that which has been or will be, to that
Which is—the absent to the present, Thought
Alone, and its quick elements, Will, Passion,
Reason, Imagination, cannot die;
They are what that which they regard appears,
The stuff whence mutability can weave
All that it has dominion o’er—worlds, worms,
Empires, and superstitions. What has thought
To do with time, or place or circumstance?
Wouldst thou behold the future?—ask and have!
Knock and it shall be opened—look and lo!
The coming age is shadowed on the past
As on a glass.63

Shelley’s mention of the immortal powers of Imagination leads us directly into

the third anagogic theme that the Romantics share alike with the Sufi poets:

Mundus Imaginalis

When Shelley states here that “Will, Passion, Reason, Imagination, cannot die,”
he refers here to the latent power of these internal faculties and senses to open
26 Leonard Lewisohn

up, in Blake’s words, “the immortal Eyes of Man into the Worlds of Thought,
into Eternity Ever Expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination.”64
This expansion of consciousness occurs because, as Coleridge later explained,
Imagination is, in its primary power, “the reflection in the finite mind of the
eternal act of creation of the infinite I AM.”65 Sufis refer to this phenomenon
of “reflection” of “the finite mind . . . in the infinite” as tafakkur: contempla-
tive meditation or visionary reflection.66 In a verse which sums up Coleridge’s
sentence in a single epigram, Shabistari thus says,

Reflection is passing from the false to the Truth

To behold the Infinite Whole within the finite part.67

Imagination is the key word here. “The notion of imagination, magical

intermediary between thought and being, incarnation of thought in image and
presence of the image in being, is a conception of the utmost importance, which
plays a leading role in the philosophy of the Renaissance and which we meet
again in the philosophy of Romanticism.”68 As Henry Corbin points out, both
in Sufism and in Christian esoteric thought of the Renaissance and the later
Romantic period,

We encounter the idea that the Godhead possesses the power of

Imagination, and that by imagining the universe God created it; that
he drew the universe from within Himself, from the external virtuali-
ties and potencies of His own being; that there exists between the
world of pure spirit and the sensible world an intermediate world
which is the idea of “Idea Images,” as the Sufis put it, the world of
“supersensory sensibility,” of the subtle magical body, “the world in
which spirits are materialized and bodies spiritualized”; that this is the
world over which Imagination holds sway; that in it the Imagination
produces effects so real that they can “mold” the imagining subject,
and that the Imagination “casts” man in the form (the mental body)
that he imagined.69

For the Sufis70 as for the Romantics as Rene Wellek pointed out, Imagi-
nation was “not merely the power of visualization, somewhere in between sense
and reason, as it had been for Aristotle . . . but a creative power by which the
mind ‘gains insight into reality,’ reads nature as a symbol of something behind
or within nature.”71 More than this though, “Imagination was the fundamental
ground of human knowledge”72 for all the Romantic poets. For Coleridge and
for Shelley in the above-cited verses, as well as for Blake73—who spoke of God
as being the Poetic Genius,74 and the “Imagination or the Divine Body in Every
 English Romantics and Persian Sufi Poets 27

Man”75—Imagination is fundamentally identical with the Platonic nous76 and is,

as Emerson put it, the “cardinal human power.”77
Furthermore, according to Blake, Shelley, Coleridge . . . and the Sufis, the
powers of passion, feeling, reason, and imagination themselves comprise the quin-
tessence of Being itself, because existence itself is thought. Blake thus proclaimed
that “Mental Things are alone Real; what is called Corporeal, Nobody knows
of its Dwelling Place, it is a Fallacy, and its Existence an Imposture . . . Vision
or Imagination is a representation of what Eternally exists.” In other words,
everything non-mental is immaterial, a truth which Shelley later has Ahasuerus
proclaim in Hellas:

The future and the past are idle shadows

Of thought’s eternal flight—they have no being;
Nought is but that which feels itself to be.78

Blake was a Berkeleyan immaterialist who shared with Shelley and Coler-
idge the Platonic notion that thought alone has created—and continues to cre-
ate—the world. “The Universe is the externalisation of the soul,” said Emerson.
“The earth, and the heavenly bodies, physics, and chemistry, we sensually treat,
as if they were self-existent; but these are the retinue of that Being we have.”79
The same idea we encounter in the Persian Sufi tradition. The world is but a
single thought generated by the Universal Mind,80 as Rumi affirms. It is utter
ignorance to consider the world to be “real” and our thoughts “unreal,” since any
grandeur the former may possess ultimately derives from the wonder of the latter.

If just a single thought comes in your consciousness

A thousand different worlds fall head over heels.
The Sultan’s bodily form is one in its outer show,
And yet behind it squadrons and battalions go.
Yet still that good king’s form is but a silhouette
Which follows the decree of thought unmanifest.
From just one single thought, a crowd has filled the plain
Like sluices opened when the floodgates are let drain.
That thought, the mass of men thinks insignificant,
But puny thought gushed through the world and ate it.
And so you see from just one thought, all trades and crafts
Throughout the world subsist: all residences
And villages, all manor houses and palaces,
All hills and peaks and parks and fields, brooks and streams,
The sun above, this firmament and earth and sea
Like fish within the sea, by thought all live and breathe.81
28 Leonard Lewisohn

To sum up, both the Sufi and Romantic poets apprehend and affirm the cre-
ative power of Imagination to animate, and Thought to generate, the cosmos.
Both have similar anagogic approaches to the metaphysical moment of poetic
inspiration. Such ideas are not merely topoi and literary themes according to
Sufi and Romantic belief but rather a shared symbolic discourse based on an
anagogic perspective of the role of the Imagination in human creativity and
consciousness that sets into vibration planes of reality and awareness other than
that of the sensible world.

Annihilation, Mystical Death, Fana’

Mystical death and dissolution of the self is another theme that English Meta-
physical and Romantic and Persian Sufi poets share in common. Since this theme
is so profoundly native to classical Christian mysticism,82 it will be helpful to see
how it was expressed by more explicitly pietistic poets of seventeenth century
before exploring its appearance among the Romantics in the nineteenth century.
The sentiments of the English Metaphysical poets are more often than
not completely Sufiesque in their metaphors and imagery. Consider Richard
Crashaw’s stanza in his poem “The Flaming Heart upon the Book and Picture
of the Seraphical Saint Teresa”:

By all of Him we have in Thee

Leave nothing of my SELF in me.
Let me so read thy life, that I
Unto all life of mine may dy.

Likewise, the tone of John Donne’s address to God in his Holy Sonnet XIV
can be seen as identical to the spiritualized eroticism of the Persian Sufi poets:

Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I

Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

Both verses elaborate the idea of self-annihilation in God couched in an

erotic imagery wherein God figures as the lover and man the ravished beloved.
Both the doctrine and imagery of such verses are startlingly close to the classical
Sufi concept of fana’ as the “annihilation of particular, self-consciousness in the
divine, universal consciousness,” a doctrine which was elaborated in Islamic lands
as an essential element of the mystic experience from the early ninth century
onward.83 Some three hundred years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad,
a Persian Sufi by the name of Abu’l-Qasim al-Junayd (d. circa 908), known by
the epithet, the “Leader of the Sufis” for his sober intellectual expression of the
 English Romantics and Persian Sufi Poets 29

most subtle of the Sufis’ ecstatic experiences, elaborated the various stages of
fana’, the last of which he described as being “that you cease to be conscious
of your ecstatic experience [of God], as a result of an overwhelming vision of
God’s witness (shahid) to you. At this stage you die as well as live, and you live
in reality, for you die to yourself and live by God. Your personal characteristics
(rasm) survive, but your independent identity (ism) vanishes.”84
While in their specifically Christian context such verses function as a kind
of poetic commentary on the famous words of the Gospel: “Anyone who wants
to be a follower of mine must renounce self; day after day he must take up his
cross, and follow me. Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever
loses his life for my sake will save it.” (Luke 9:23–4; Matthew 16:24–6), their
resonances in Sufi doctrine and poetry are so obvious as to be virtually identical
to that of the English poets. Consider the parallels in theme and imagery to the
verses from Donne’s Sonnet IV cited above in the following two verses from a
Sufi poem by Muhammad Shirin Maghribi (d. 808/1410):

Enravish me, usurp me from me, oh beloved

in your rapture
Seize me, seize me, in spirit-filled attraction
But me, me! there is no other veil like me
Before me—!

How, how, tell me how

I can get just one step outside my self
  and go beyond everything that is ‘me’ and ‘I’
If and since my very being stands in the way
  roadblocking me.85

A similar idea of annihilation and dissolution of the Selfhood appears in all

the Romantics. It is probably most clearly expressed in Blake’s poem Milton,
which inculcates the teaching that ego-centrism is itself Death. Annihilation, or
as the Sufis call it, fana’, on the other hand, is in fact not annihilation at all,
but a liberation from the constrictions of the selfhood, expressed as follows in
Shabistari’s Garden of Mystery:

Go! Take this ‘self ’ which bars the path;

Each moment engage yourself in Faith anew.
Inside us all the lower soul’s an infidel:
Rest not content with this Islam of outer form.86

And that is also why Blake’s Milton, a symbol for the inspired man of Poetic
Genius, clearly announces his pursuit of annihilation:
30 Leonard Lewisohn

I will go down to self annihilation and eternal death,

Lest the Last Judgment come & find me unannihilate
And I be seiz’d & giv’n into the hands of my own Selfhood.87

Through annihilation of self, one attains to what is known as “subsistence-in-God”

(baqa’) in the lexicon of Persian Sufism,88 an idea that Blake also enunciates per-
fectly later on in his poem where he attacks Satan, his symbol for the Infidel
Selfhood (in the Sufi lexicon termed nafs-i kafar), and has Milton exclaim:

I come to Self Annihilation.

Such are the Laws of Eternity, that each shall mutually
Annihilate himself for others’ good, as I for thee.
Thy purpose & the purpose of thy Priests & of thy Churches
Is to impress on men the fear of death, to teach’
Trembling & fear, terror, constriction, abject selfishness.
Mine is to teach Men to despise death & to go on
In fearless majesty annihilating Self, laughing to scorn
Thy Laws & terrors, shaking down thy Synagogues as webs.
I come to discover before Heav’n & Hell the Self righteousness
In all its hypocritic turpitude . . . to put off
In Self annihilation all that is not of God alone,
To put off Self & all I have, ever & ever. Amen.89

Similarly, Rumi maintains that the best sort of existence is found only when
a man annihilates his “self.” Although vis-à-vis the divine Attributes, he writes
in the Mathnawi, the mystic may seem to be “annihilated,” his “annihilation”
(fana’) is in fact a higher form of ‘being-in-God (baqa’).’90 “Since by way of
Annihilation you have discovered how to survive in life (in baqaha az fanaha
yafti),” Rumi reproaches the reader, “how is it you turn your back on Anni-
hilation? . . . Since the latter is superior to the former—pursue Annihilation,
and adore the One-who-changes.”91 Elsewhere, he counsels: “Die, if you would
see Him who brings forth Eternal Life bring forth a living person from this
mortified person. Become Winter as you would see how Spring is manifest. Be
Night if you would behold the advent of Day.”92
We may compare this advice with the counsel given by Shelley in his ode
to his friend Keats, Adonais:

Die!
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled!—Rome’s azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.
 English Romantics and Persian Sufi Poets 31

. . . ’Tis Adonais calls! Oh, hasten thither,

No more let Life divide what Death can join together.93

Eternal Feminine: Earthly Mirror of Divine Beauty

O wrangling schooles, that search what fire

  Shall burn this world, had none the wit
Unto this knowledge to aspire
  That this her feaver might be it?
John Donne (1572–1631)

As Jill Line has demonstrated in her insightful book on Shakespeare, the philo-
sophical doctrine sustaining these verses by John Donne can be traced back to
the Neoplatonic erotic theory in Marsilio Ficino’s commentary on the Symposium
of Plato,94 and in particular to the idea that by medium of earthly forms and
terrestrial beauty the soul engages in loving contemplation of the divine beauty
of God.95 This fundamental mystical idea appears in Petrarch’s sonnets celebrating
Laura, in Dante’s La vita nuova honoring his love of Beatrice, and again in all
the great artists and poets of the Renaissance. Donne’s contemporary, Spenser
in The Fairie Queen (1596) paraphrased this Platonic doctrine of the Beautiful
reflected in the fair things of the earth as follows:

That wondrous pattern, whosoe’er it be

  Whether in earth laid up in secret store,
Or else in heaven, that no man may it see
  With sinful eyes, for fear it to deflower,
  Is perfect Beauty, which all men adore.
     Whose face and feature doth so much excel
     All mortal sense, that none the same may tell.

Thereof as every earthly thing partakes,

  Or more or less by influence divine
So it more fair accordingly it makes,
  And the gross matter of this earthly mine
  Which encloseth it, thereafter doth refine,
     Doing away the dross which dims the light
     Of that fair beam, which therein is empight.96

Several decades later, Shakespeare (d. 1616) likewise referred to that same divine
Beauty, the heavenly prototype of all earthly beauty,97 as being an unmoving,
unchanging, immutable “substance,” expressing exactly the same Platonic doctrine
in his Sonnet 53:
32 Leonard Lewisohn

What is the substance, whereof are you made

That millions of strange shadows on you tend?
Since everyone hath, every one, one shade,
And you, but one, can every shadow lend.
Describe Adonis and the counterfeit
Is poorly imitated after you;
On Helen’s cheek all art of beauty set,
And you in Grecian tires are painted new.
Speak of the spring and foison of the year,
The one does shadow of your beauty show,
The other as your bounty doth appear;
And you in every blessed shape we know.
  In all external grace you have some part,
  But you like none, none you, for constant heart.

The same Platonic teaching concerning the reflection of divine beauty in the
mirror of the Eternal Feminine found in Donne, Spenser, and Shakespeare also
reappears in the nineteenth-century English Romantics and the American Tran-
scendentalists. One of the most beautiful poems ever composed in any language
on the manifestation of Divine Beauty in earthly forms—and in this case, the
Eternal Feminine—is Shelley’s Epipsychidion,98 where the supreme expression of
this Platonic doctrine among the English Romantics appears. In the following
verses the poet celebrates his ethereal beloved and praises the deathless reflection
of the perfect forms of heavenly beauty upon earth in her:

See where she stands! a mortal shape indued

With love and life and light and deity,
And motion that may change but cannot die;
An image of some bright Eternity;
A shadow of some golden dream; a Splendour
Leaving the third sphere pilotless; a tender
Reflection of the eternal Moon of Love
Under whose motions life’s dull billows move.99

Later on in the same poem, delighting in the poetic hyperbole which insists on
beholding the divine original perpetually reviving the mortal exemplar, pene-
trating “into the height of Love’s rare universe,” he actually refers to the same
heavenly “substance,” which was the divine source of his longing:

Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound,

And our veins beat together; and our lips
 English Romantics and Persian Sufi Poets 33

With other eloquence than words, eclipse

The soul that burns between them, and the wells
Which boil under our being’s inmost cells,
The fountains of our deepest life, shall be
Confused in Passion’s golden purity . . .
In one another’s substance finding food,
Like flames too pure and light and unimbued
To nourish their bright lives with baser prey,
Which point to Heaven and cannot pass away. . . .100

Shelley’s doctrine here, as Richard White pointed out, is a poetic para-

phrase of the speech on love made by the comic poet Aristophanes in Plato’s
Symposium, who speculated to the gathering that the lover might regain his lost
original wholeness through merging into the beloved.101
The Neoplatonic doctrine that the soul is an emanation of the One102
expressed in these verses was also enunciated in similar terms in Rumi’s
­Mathnawi,103 in the Fusus al-hikam by Ibn ‘Arabi,104 as well as in other works
on romantic and divine love by Ibn ‘Arabi’s later poet-disciples in the Persian
Sufi tradition—specifically the Divine Flashes (Lama‘at) of Fakhr al-Din ‘Iraqi and
the Divine Scintillations (Lawayih) of Jami. Although space does not here permit
elaboration in any detail of the intricacies of the Sufi metaphysics of love105 or
the Akbarian doctrines of theophany (tajalli) and theomonism (wahdat al-wujud)
which animate the Sufi poetry of these two great poets, suffice it to say that the
Platonic theory underlying Shelley’s above verses is quite close to the doctrine
in chapter XXIV of the Divine Flashes of ‘Iraqi. All the lover’s attributes in truth
belong to the Beloved, ‘Iraqi asserts, for the lover “cannot be called a partner, for
partnership in attributes would demand two separate essences. But in the lover’s
contemplative eye there exists in all reality but one single existent Essence.”

A hundred things
  a million or more
  are one.

“Thus all attributes pertain to the Beloved alone, leaving no

ontological attribute to the lover.”106

This is exactly Shelley’s doctrine of love as well, where he says in Epi-

psychidion, vv. 573–4:

We shall become the same, we shall be one

Spirit within two frames, oh wherefore two?107
34 Leonard Lewisohn

After the fashion of some classical Persian Sufi poet, Shelley describes in his
poem Adonais his vision of the One beyond the temporal realm of generation
and decay, seeming to inculcate a kind of Platonic Sufi tawhid (the notion of
divine unity which is the basis of Islamic faith) in verses which approach the
Sufi vision of Unity within multiplicity:

The One remains, the many change and pass;

Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity
Till Death tramples it to fragments.108

Exactly the same metaphor of the shadow of earthly beauties acting as prisms
mirroring and relaying the reflection of the One’s heavenly radiance to the soul
appears in Rumi’s Mathnawi. “That which made you wonder and marvel at the
faces of the Fair is the light of the Sun reflected through a glass prism. It is
that many-coloured glass which makes that one Light appear as so many hues
like this to you. So make yourself fit to gaze on that Light without a glass, lest
when the glass is broke, you be left blind.”109 Here, we see the same archetypal
poetic topos and anagogic insight shared by the Romantic and Sufi poet alike.
Shelley’s metaphor of the dome of many-colored light refracting the Light of
Eternity had first been coined in these verses by the Sage of Konya it appears.
Had Byron perhaps on their sailing trips recited these verses from the Rumi’s
Mathnawi to Shelley? This same kind of anagogic mirror metaphor was utilized
by a number of other Persian Sufi poets,110 and was mentioned repeatedly by
‘Iraqi in his Divine Flashes. The following passage is typical:

In each mirror, each moment the Beloved shows a different face, a

different shape. Each instant reflections change to suit the mirror,
image follows image in harmony with the situation.

In each mirror, each moment

  a new face reveals His beauty
Now he is Adam, and now
  He appears in the robes of Eve.

Thus, He never twice shows the same face; never in two mirrors does
one form appear. Abu Talib al-Makki says, “He never shines through one shape
twice nor manifests as one form in two places.”

His loveliness owns

  a hundred thousand faces;
 English Romantics and Persian Sufi Poets 35

gaze upon a different fair one

  in every atom;
for He needs must show
  to every separate mote
a different aspect
  of His Beauty.
“One” is the fountainhead
  of all numbers:
each split second wells up
  a new perplexity.

Thus it is that every lover gives a different sign of the Beloved and every
gnostic a different explanation; every realized one seems to point to something
different, yet each of them declares:

Expressions are many

  but Thy loveliness is one
Each of us refers
  To that single Beauty. (al-Nuri)111

And in Jami’s mystical epic Joseph and Zulayka (Yusuf va Zulaykha), this doc-
trine is carefully enunciated as well.112 A few stanzas later on in Adonais, Shelley
celebrates the divine light and love that fill the universe and is woven through
the wool of life, diffusing a fiery glow that illuminates each person according
to his or her capacity to receive its light:

. . . That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,

That Beauty in which all things work and move,
That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst.113

Shelley’s verses here (penned to celebrate his beloved “Emilia as a Platonic the-
ophany on earth . . . the earthly vision of Platonic Beauty, Love, and Immor-
tality”114) have many close correspondences in the Persian Sufi poets’ erotic
theology, where we are told that the divine Beloved created the world like a
mirror wherein God’s Beauty and Grandeur are reflected and adored.115 This Sufi
view of the cosmic hierophany is based on the common metaphysical symbol-
ism shared by medieval Islamic and Christian thinkers alike, according to which
36 Leonard Lewisohn

“all things are like so many mirrors,” as the late Roman author Macrobius said,
“which reflect in their beauty the unique visage of God.”116 In the Persian Sufi
tradition, one of most famous verses which describes the reflection of divine
beauty in Eternity a parte ante (azal) which causes “love” (‘ishq) to appear and
“set ablaze” the entire world was composed by Hafiz:

One day in pre-Eternity a ray of your beauty

Flashed forth in a blaze of theophany.
Then Love revealed itself and cast down
Its fire that razed the earth from toe to crown.117

Hafiz speaks here of the “Pre-eternal” role of Beauty which permeates and
infiltrates the creation and Love which ultimately consumes it. Inspired by Ibn
‘Arabi’s theory of divine self-manifestation or theophany (tajalli: the same Arabic
term used by the poet here), Hafiz describes how God’s beauty ‘showed itself
forth’ (that is: theo-phany = tajalli) in two distinct manners. Firstly, His Beauty
appeared through an essential theophany (tajalli-yi dhati) which corresponds to the
level of ‘the most holy emanation’ (al-fayd al-aqdas). Secondly, His Love appeared
through the “theophany of the divine Attributes” (tajalli-yi sifati), which is the
level of “the holy emanation” (al-fayd al-muqaddas).
All creation thus serves as a mirror reflecting God’s Beauty and Love
according to Hafiz’s metaphysic, appearing through two basic types of “self-­
manifestation” or theophany (tajalli) of the Absolute. During the second
theophany, Love emerges from its invisible, purely intelligible condition, appear-
ing in external phenomena, permeating every aspect of existence. Both through
the love of human beings for one another (which the Sufis call figurative love:
‘ishq-i majazi), and through that love which human beings have for God (which
Sufis call divine love: ‘ishq-i haqiqi), the fire of Love sets everything in the world
ablaze.118 Shakespeare, referring to the “right Promethean fire” of the Eternal
Feminine’s apparition, espouses this same “doctrine” as follows:—

From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive:

They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain, and nourish all the world.119

Now, the metaphysical topos of Love’s fiery apparition through Beauty in

the mirror of the world has a completely Christian (and Islamic) Platonic pedi-
gree. It is clearly enunciated in The Divine Names of Pseudo-Dionysius,120 “a work
which describes the universe as an inexhaustible irradiation of beauty, a grandiose
expression of the ubiquity of the First Beauty, a dazzling cascade of splendours.”121
 English Romantics and Persian Sufi Poets 37

Centuries later it appears in Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s Symposium (which

inspired Shakespeare’s verse cited above122), where we read how “the single face
of God shines successively in three mirrors.” These “mirrors” are the Angel, the
Soul, and the Body of the World. The Angel here corresponds to what Muslim
philosophers and Sufis call the First Intellect; the Soul corresponds exactly to
the Anima Mundi or Universal Soul (nafs-i kulli) of Peripatetic thinkers such as
Avicenna, a doctrine endorsed by all Sufis and the Illuminationist philosophers
(Ishraqi) of Islam. The Body of the World is of course the materia of the world.
“The Angelic Mind,” Ficino continues, “sees that face of God imprinted in its
own breast. It immediately admires what it has seen. It cleaves passionately to it
forever. The grace of that divine face we call beauty. The Angel’s passion, clinging
inwardly to the face of God, we call Love.”
Precisely the same doctrine is also taught by Hafiz here who envisions in
his verse the pre-Eternal ray of divine Beauty setting the world ablaze with love.
So identical are the Neoplatonic theoerotic doctrines of the Sufis to Renaissance
Christian-Platonism that glossing Hafiz’s verse by Ficino’s exegesis of the ­Symposium
works perfectly in this case. Ficino explains that “beauty is a certain lively and
spiritual grace infused by the shining ray of God, first in the Angel, and thence in
the souls of men, the shapes of bodies, and sounds; a grace which through reason,
sight, and hearing moves and delights our souls; in delighting, carries them away,
and in carrying them away, inflames them with burning love.”123 This apparition of
beauty—first to the Angel and then to men, detailed in depth by Ficino here—is
in fact precisely recorded by Hafiz in the next verse in his poem:

Your Face revealed itself. It saw the Angels had

No Love; so then it turned like fire consumed
With jealous rage, and struck the soul of man.

If we now review Shelley’s stanza cited above (“That Light . . .”), we

see that the light imagery of Shelley and Hafiz both anagogically descry the
same reality. That “Light whose smile kindles the Universe,” which fills Shelley
with such enthusiasm and that generates that “sustaining Love” reflected in the
mirrors of “man and beast and earth and air and sea” throughout all levels of
the Body of the World, is essentially identical to the pre-Eternal epiphany of
beauty envisioned by the Persian Shirazi poet. Furthermore, this is exactly the
same metaphysical doctrine that had been taught by Spenser who described
how “every earthly thing partakes” of the “influence divine,” and so refines the
dross of that “gross matter” which had dimmed “the light of that fair beam.”
To conclude this study of the anagogic correspondences between Persian
Sufi and English Romantic poetry it is fitting that we consider how both
Platonic traditions are united by their shared ecumenical approach to religious
38 Leonard Lewisohn

diversity. Their intellectual fraternity is best reflected in the similarity of their

understanding of the topos of the unity of religions.

The Unity of Religions

Arthur McCalla informs us that “Romanticism holds that the essential con-
tent of myths and religions is the same everywhere and at all times (that is,
the unfolding of Spirit), [so] it follows that differences among them are only
superficial and that there is no absolute distinction between Christianity and
other religions. . . . Romanticism practices an analogical hermeneutics of myth
and religion that discovers an inner unity beneath the surface differences that
seem so striking.”124 This ecumenical outlook on the higher unity of religious
diversity on the part of Romanticism bears comparison with the traditional
Sufi standpoint of the transcendental Unity of Religions (wahdat al-madhahib).125
Consider, for instance, these verses by Shaykh Baha’i (d. 1030/1631), a leading
Persian Sufi poet of seventeenth-century Persia and one of the greatest Shi‘ite
divines and scientists of the entire Safavid epoch:

I visited the hermitage of pietists and priests;

I witnessed they all knelt in awe and reverence
Before her visage there. Since in the winecell of the monk
And in the chapel of the pietist I was
At home, it’s there I dwell. At times I make my residence
The mosque, at times the cell: which is to say, it’s you
I seek in every place, both in the tavern and the church.

Whatever door I knock upon, the Lord within

The house is always you, and every place I go
The light that shines therein is always you.
The One beloved in bodega and convent you:
From Ka‘ba or pagoda all my quest and aim
Again, is you. You, you, are what I seek therein:
The rest—pagoda or the Ka‘ba—all is but a ruse.126

In these verses Shaykh Baha’i follows a Sufi tradition that can be traced back at
least to the thirteenth century, if not earlier, in Persian poetry, which espoused
the ecumenical idea that, as one modern commentator on Hafiz’s verse has put
it: “the relish for the spiritual quest exists in everyone, and all the various reli-
gions have the same basic spiritual aim. Moreover, divine Love is not restricted
to Sufi mystics alone, for both the mosque and the temple are places of love.”127
The commentator on Hafiz was referring to two different verses where the
 English Romantics and Persian Sufi Poets 39

poet tells us that all the various faiths and sects of mankind comprise multiple
expressions of a single Truth:

Let’s forgive the seventy-two sects for their ridiculous

Wars and misbehaviors.128 Because they couldn’t take in
The path of truth, they took the road of moonshine.129
❧
Whether we are drunk or sober, each of us is making
For the street of the Friend. The temple, the synagogue,
The church and the mosque are all houses of love.130

Many of the Romantic poets held similar if not nearly identical views to those
of Hafiz. Tennyson, for instance, writing in his poem “Akbar’s Dream” (composed
not incidentally after reading and translating Hafiz from the original Persian—a
passion that he shared with his friend Edward FitzGerald), espoused exactly the
same open-minded pluralistic attitude towards religious diversity:

the never-changing One

And ever-changing Many, in praise of whom
The Christian bell, the cry from off the mosque,
And vaguer voices of Polytheism
Make but one music, harmonising “Pray.”131

Aside from being touched by the “Tongue of the Invisible” (Hafiz), Tennyson’s
views here had also been inspired by the Indian Sufi poets who wrote in Per-
sian at the court of Akbar the Great (ruler of Mughal India, reg. 1542–1605)
in praise of religious syncretism. Poets such as ‘Urfi, Faydi and Raha’i had all
penned verse in praise of a transcendental religious unity, aiming to assimilate,
accept and absorb the differing views of Hindus, Muslims, and Zoroastrians.
‘Urfi’s famous verse sums up the spirit of their ecumenical endeavor:

The lover’s drunk and senseless; he

Knows neither Islam or infidelity.
He’s like a moth empassioned over fire
So one appears to him the burning pyre
Outside the Hindu’s pagoda
Or candle burning in the Ka‘ba.132

Tennyson’s attitude toward religious diversity, obviously influenced by his read-

ing of Persian and Mughal Sufi poetry, are echoed in Byron’s comment (jotted
40 Leonard Lewisohn

down in a footnote to his poem The Giaour [l. 734] written in 1813) that “On
a still evening, when the Muezzin has a fine voice . . . the effect is solemn and
beautiful beyond all the bells in Christendom.”133 Byron, like Tennyson, knew
Persian poetry quite well.134 He had read Hafiz and Sa‘di,135 and was himself
adept in the doctrines (and quite probably an initiate of) the Bektashi Order of
Sufis in Ottoman Turkey.136 Blake, it also should be recalled, in 1788, had etched
a short tract entitled “All Religions are One,” where he preaches that “The
Religions of all Nations are derived from each Nation’s reception of the Poetic
Genius, which is every where call’d the Spirit of Prophecy.”137 This ecumenical
outlook on religious diversity amongst the Romantics is ultimately traceable
back to the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists such as Henry More
(1614–80), whose doctrine on this matter was quite close to the seventeenth-
century Persian Platonists of the School of Isfahan,138 as Marshall Hodgson and
Corbin have pointed out.139

Conclusion: Platonic Poetics and the

Science of Anagogic Criticism

From the foregoing, it can be seen the epistemological key to understanding

the Platonic poetics of both Persian Sufi and English Romantic poetry is to
be found in the science of anagogic criticism. As demonstrated above, if we
approach both the English Romantic and the Persian Sufi poetic traditions ana-
gogically, contemplating their topoi, myths, and symbols as fundamental expressions
of universal symbols, there appear to be far more parallelisms than divergences of
perspectives between poets in both mystical traditions. This is particularly the
case if we study the spiritual sentiments of Sufis and Romantics. Anagogically
speaking, as shown above, they point to essentially the same metaphysical truth
and reality, which are expressed poetically in a lexicon which is predominantly
Platonic/ Neoplatonic, whatever their exoteric religious persuasions—Christian
(Romantic) or Muslim (Sufi)—may be.
To demonstrate this, it may be helpful, but not always necessary to know
how much Persian, for instance, Tennyson knew, or whether Byron and Shelley
had actually read Sa‘di and Hafiz. But even without knowing these helpful
bio-bibliographical details, I think it may be demonstrated that anagogically they
were expressing fundamentally similar spiritual visions. Geographically, of course,
because “the favourite location of English poetry” that was composed by Roman-
tics such as Shelley, Byron, and Robert Southey, “in the second decade of the
nineteenth century becomes the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East,”140
there was a tendency on the part of almost all the Romantics to favour the
Muslim Orient and sometimes even to celebrate Islam.141 Likewise, in terms of
literary influence, one also notices that at the end of the eighteenth and begin-
 English Romantics and Persian Sufi Poets 41

ning of the nineteenth centuries “there came into existence a small but significant
body of work translated from Persian,”142 works which clearly did have an effect
on the English and American Romantic movements. Yet even without these
literary influences and tendencies, which are significant, it should be reiterated
that the anagogic perspective partook of the shared Islamic–Christian Platonic
heritage that was quintessentially both Romantic and Sufi.
Apart from the Platonic and Neo-Platonic heritage, M. H. Abrams has
shown in his monumental study of romanticism Natural Supernaturalism143 how
deeply the Romantic poets were steeped in Hermetic and esoteric currents of
thought. Just as the Romantics shared a fascination with Platonic philosophy
and Neoplatonic esoteric doctrines, so the Persian poets were steeped in Sufi
mystical doctrine and symbolism; for this reason any comparative study of
Romantic and Sufi poetry must take such forms of esoteric speculation seriously,
not dismissing it to the realm of the fanciful and fantastic. Unfortunately, the
common ground of the esoteric has been all but eradicated from the study of
literature by what can only be described as the secular mind’s inherent distaste
for metaphysical speculation. This is the product of a “subtle, unacknowledged
form of agnosticism” that, as Henry Corbin puts it, “consists in raising a fron-
tier between what is commonly known as philosophy and what is known as
theology.” Although the origins of this frontier are situated remote in time,
“it has particularly made itself felt in the countries of so-called Latin civiliza-
tion . . . where philosophy as such has lost contact with ‘the phenomenon of
the Holy Book’ which, if it makes its presence known, there are philosophers
to claim that it is no longer philosophy.” But it is only by grace of the esoteric
dimension that philosophy and theology may operate as a unity. For this reason,
as Corbin reminds us,

There is no such thing as Christian philosophy, or Judaic philosophy

or Islamic philosophy. If we trace carefully the origins of this decla-
ration, we collide with the frontier erected between philosophy and
theology, and there it can be seen to be a consequence of the refusal
of the esoteric, which is nevertheless common to the ‘religions of the
Book.’ It is that esoteric which traditional philosophy and sciences
postulate, and which has isolated them from official philosophy and
theology to the extent which, in the West, these refuse what remains
the axis of oriental thought.144

For the purposes of this essay, the most relevant aspect of this secular “refusal
of the esoteric” is our dismissal of the role that anagogic criticism must play in
comparative literature. The Poetic Genius and Imagination, as understood by both
the Romantics and Sufis, has access to an anagogic, parabolic Reality.145 Once this
is admitted, and once the esoteric symbolism and doctrines sustaining that Reality
42 Leonard Lewisohn

are appreciated and understood, then, whether the poetic expression of that vision
be phrased in Latin or Greek, Turkish or Hindi, Arabic or English, Persian or Japa-
nese, becomes almost a secondary consideration. As the Sufi poet Sana’i teaches us:

When the song you sing is for the sake of Faith,

Who cares if it is in Syriac or in Hebrew sung?
When the place you seek is for the sake of Truth,
What matter if your abode is Jabalqa or Jabalsa?146

Notes

 1. The article included here was originally entitled “Correspondences between
English Romantic and Persian Sufi Poets: an Essay in Anagogic Criticism” and published
by the author in Temenos Academy Review (12:2009), pp. 189–226.
 2. The reason for this is primarily scholars’ poor grasp of the nuances of Sufi
mysticism and doctrine. For instance, the Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis attempted to read
Rimbaud as “an oriental-Sufi poet” in his Sufism and Surrealism (London: Saqi 2005) (p.
194), but because of his unwillingness to seriously engage with the mystical doctrines
which the French voyant shared with the Sufi visionaries, his comparisons remain provoc-
ative at best and unconvincing at worst. His work stands in contrast to Azize Özgüven’s
“Two Mystic Poets: Yunus Emre and William Blake,” in A. Turgut Kut and Günay Kut,
In Memoriam Abdülbakı Gölpinarli, in Journal of Turkish Studies, 20 (1996), pp. 234–47, who
provides not only some interesting parallels in their thought, but several deep insights.
 3. Cf. Eric Schroeder’s remarks in his “Verse Translation and Hafiz,” Journal of
Near Eastern Studies, VII/4 (1948), p. 216 on the similarity of Hafiz and Donne, and the
interesting observations between correspondences between European and Persian poets
made by Robert Rehder, “Persian Poets and Modern Critics,” Edebiyat, II/1 (1977), pp.
98–99. However, I do not wish to exaggerate these similarities, but merely to observe
there is more room for making comparisons—in respect to rhetorical and poetic devices,
poetic forms (e.g., between sonnet and ghazal) symbolism, metaphysical and cosmological
theory, erotic theology, etc.—between these schools of poetry than there is reason to
accentuate their differences.
 4. Cf. Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press 1969), pp. 179ff. and parts 2–3 below.
  5. While it is true that “the Arabs observed the passage of philosophy from Hellas
to Islam,” as F. E. Peters tells us (Peters, “The Origins of Islamic Platonism: the School
Tradition,” in Parviz Morewedge, ed., Islamic Philosophical Theology, [Albany, NY: SUNY
1979]), p. 14), “and carefully recorded its progress,” the transmission of the thought of
Aristotle in the Islamic world is far more easy to trace than that of Plato. As a consequence,
we do not know as much about the transmission of Platonism in Islam as we do about
Platonism’s transmission in Christianity. There were also many varieties of Platonism and
Neoplatonism in Islam—from that of the free-thinker Muhammad ibn Zakariyya al-Razi
(d. 925), to the intellectual mysticism of the Isma‘ilis, to the ecstatic meditations of the
 English Romantics and Persian Sufi Poets 43

Sufis, to the Pythagoreanizing Neoplatonism of the Ishraqi thinkers—all of whom in

diverse manners, drew on Plato’s thought for inspiration, as Peters (ibid.) observes. The
contributions to Parviz Morewedge, ed., Neoplatonism and Islamic Thought (Albany NY:
SUNY 1992) illustrate this diversity of the heritage of Plato in Islam. As Richard Walzer
points out, Platonism was nearly always conflated with Neoplatonism in Islam, for “the
Plato to whom al-Farabi (with the exception of his theory of the ideal state), Ibn Sina,
Ibn Badjdja and Ibn Rushd refer is, whether explicitly or implicitly, always the Plato of
Plotinus and his followers.” Richard Walzer, “Aflatun,” Encyclopædia of Islam, 2nd edition,
I, p. 234. Having said this, after nearly 200 years of scholarship on Islamic mysticism,
there is not even one good study—nay, hardly even one mediocre essay—comparing Sufi
theosophy to Platonic/Neoplatonic thought. A good place to begin reading, however, is
John Walbridge’s The Wisdom of the Mystic East: Suhrawardi and Platonic Orientalism (Albany,
NY: SUNY 2001).
 6. Peters, “The Origins of Islamic Platonism,” p. 15.
 7. In Richard Holmes, ed., Shelley on Love: Selected Writings (London: Flamingo
1996), pp. 97–156,
 8. As Richard Holmes in his biographical study of Shelley: the Pursuit (London:
Flamingo 1995), p. 431, observes. Shelley also translated Plato’s Phaedo, Ion and several
other dialogues.
 9. See J. A. Notopoulos, “Shelley and Thomas Taylor,” PMLA, LI (1936), pp.
502–17.
10. The Platonism of Shelley: A Study of Platonism and the Poetic Mind (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press 1949). While it is surprising to find Shelley’s spiritual teachings
based on Plato’s writings are still misunderstood by scholars, it is utterly astounding that
a learned poet and critic such as T. S. Eliot could accuse him of not having any “meta-
physical or philosophical mind,” and imagine that his verse was the effusions of a “con-
fused . . . [and] a cloudy Platonist.” In his “Keats and Shelley,” in The Use of Poetry and the
Use of Criticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1933, rprt. 1996, 6th printing), p. 81.
11. See F. Jahanpour, “Western Encounters with Persian Sufi Literature,” in L.
Lewisohn and D. Morgan (eds.) The Heritage of Sufism: Late Classical Persianate Sufism:
the Safavid and Mughal Period (Oxford: Oneworld 1999), pp. 50–51.
12. Kathleen Raine, “Traditional Symbolism in ‘Kubla Khan,’ ” in idem., Defending
Ancient Springs (Suffolk: Golgonooza Press 1985), pp. 88–104.
13. Kathleen Raine has shown this in so many of her erudite studies. In particular
see her monumental two-volume study of the Platonic sources of Blake’s symbolism
and terminology: Blake and Tradition (Bollingen Series XXXV/11; Princeton: Princeton
University Press 1968).
14. American Transcendentalism has been described as an offshoot of Romanticism’s
basic ideas, comprising “an agreeable summary of the less difficult phases of roman-
tic thought—contempt for the rationalist side of the eighteenth century . . . exaltation
of intuition, spirit, sensibility, imagination, faith, the unmeasurable, the wordless.” Crane
Brinton, “Romanticism,” in Donald Borchert (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2nd edition
(Farmington, MI: Thomson/Gale 2006), VIII, p. 488. Martin Halliwell thus describes
transcendentalism as “closely associated with the flowering of American Romanticism
in New England in the 1830s and 1840s.” “Transcendentalism,” in Christopher Murray
44 Leonard Lewisohn

(ed.), Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850 (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn 2004), II,
p. 1149. Ian D. Copestake (“Emerson, Ralph Waldo,” Ibid., I, p. 318) described Emerson
as “the embodiment of American Romanticism.”
15. See Jay Bergman, “Neoplatonism and American Aesthetics,” in Aphrodite Alex-
andrakis and Nicholas Moutakfakis (eds.), Neoplatonism and Western Aesthetics (Albany, NY:
SUNY 2002), pp. 177–92, who details the influences of, for example, Pythagorus on
Thoreau (p. 186) and Thomas Taylor on Emerson (p. 178).
16. Kurt Weinberg, “Romanticism,” in Alex Preminger (ed.), The Princeton Encyclo-
pedia of Poetry and Poetics (London: Macmillan 1986), p. 720.
17. Luce Lopez-Baralt has mainly concentrated on the influence of Sufism on
medieval Spanish Catholic poets such as San Juan de la Cruz, as in her remarkable San
Juan de la Cruz y el Islam (Mexico City/San Juan: Colegio de México/University of Puerto
Rico Press 1985), but has also touched on the influence of Sufism on contemporary
Spanish prose literature in her Islam in Spanish Literature: from the Middle Ages to the Present,
tr. Andrew Hurley (Leiden: Brill 1992). Menocal’s Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of
the Lyric (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1994) explores (among other things) the
influence of medieval Islamic literature on modern poets such as Ezra Pound and rock
musicians such as Eric Clapton. Part 1 of Parvin Loloi’s Hafiz, Master of Persian Poetry: A
Critical Bibliography, English Translations Since the Eighteenth Century (London: I. B. Tauris
2004) provides a good account of the influence of Hafiz on the English Romantics. M.
Farzan’s many studies of this subject include, among others, his “Whitman and Sufism:
Towards ‘A Persian Lesson,’ ” in American Literature, 41/1 (1976), pp. 572–82, which is
reprinted in the present volume.
18. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1957),
p. 100.
19. Anatomy of Criticism, p. 99.
20. Anatomy of Criticism, p. 118.
21. The ground-breaking work in this field is Javad Nurbakhsh, Sufi Symbolism:
The Nurbakhsh Encyclopedia of Sufi Terminology, translated by various authors (London and
New York: KNP 1984–2004), 16 vols.
22. See my Beyond Faith and Infidelity: the Sufi Poetry and Teachings of Mahmud
Shabistari (London: Curzon Press 1995), chap. 6.
23. The vast literature in Persian on this is covered in Leonard Lewisohn (ed.),
Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry (London: I. B. Tauris 2010).
24. Roger Hornsby, “Carpe Diem,” in Alex Preminger (ed.), The Princeton Handbook
of Poetic Terms (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1986), p. 28.
25. Az day kah gudhasht hich az u yad makun. Farda kah nayamada-ast, faryad makun.
Bar namada u gudhashta bunyad makun: hali khwush bash u ‘umr bar bad makun.
26. In Edward Fitzgerald (trans.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, edited with an intro-
duction and notes by R. A. Nicholson (London: Adam and Charles Black 1909, reprinted
Tehran: British Council 2003, with facing Persian text; introduction in Persian by Husayn
Ilahi-Qumsha’i), Quatrain XXXVII.
27. Cited in Husayn Ilahi-Qumsha’i, Dar qalamru-yi zarrin: 365 ruz-i ba adabiyat-i
Inglisi (Tehran: Sukhan 1386/2007), pp. 163–64.
28. Blake: Complete Writings, ed. G. Keynes (London: OUP 1972), p. 761 (“For the
Sexes: the Gates of Paradise”).
 English Romantics and Persian Sufi Poets 45

29. Divan, ed. Khanlari, ghazal 385: 4. In Robert Bly and Leonard Lewisohn
(trans.) The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door (Thirty Poems of Hafez) (New York:
Harper Collins 2008). Although Khanlari’s lectio is raz (secret), three of his MSS. read:
‘ayb (fault), which is the reading we follow here (this is also Qazwı̄nı̄ & Ghanı̄’s lectio).
As will be seen from the following story, a homily on the evils of fault-finding is the
most likely soteriological message the poet meant to convey here. Commenting on this
verse, a seventeenth-century commentator on Hafiz relates an interesting tale from a
certain “Treatise on the Benefits of Belief ” (Risala-yi fawa’id al-‘aqa’id) about the ascen-
sion of the Prophet. “Having returned from the divine Presence, the Prophet found
himself standing in the midst of Paradise. He was given a robe of honour to put on.
He thought to himself ‘How nice it would be if the members of my community might
also receive some benefit from this robe as well.’ Gabriel at that moment appeared and
said, ‘Indeed, the members of your community will benefit from this robe of honour
but on one condition.’ Upon return to his terrestrial abode, the Prophet summoned his
elect Companions and related other particulars of his spiritual journey, before concluding
with the above account. He commented, ‘Now, I wonder if there is any among you
who can fulfil that condition so I may give him this robe?’ ‘Umar, Uthman and Abu
Bakr each rose and offered their own views about the meaning of Gabriel’s binding
condition, yet one by one the Prophet bade them be seated. Finally when it came the
turn of ‘Ali, the Prophet asked, ‘So ‘Ali, to fulfill this condition, what would you do?’
‘Ali replied, ‘I would reveal the upright virtues (rast) of God’s devotees and conceal their
faults.’ ‘That, indeed, is the condition!’ the Prophet said, bestowing upon ‘Ali that robe
of honour (khirqah), which has been passed ever since down to the Sufi masters of the
present day. Indeed, being a dervish totally consists in concealing the faults of people.”
Abu’l-Hasan ‘Abd al-Rahman Khatmi Lahuri, Sharh-i ‘irfani-yi ghazalhā-yi-i Hafiz, edited
by Baha’ al-Din Khurramshahi, Kurush Mansuri, and Husayn Muti‘i-Amin (Tehran:
Nashr-i Qatrah 1374 A.Hsh./1995), vol. IV, p. 2563.
30. Anatomy of Criticism, p. 119.
31. Divan-i ‘Attar, ed. T. Tafadduli, 3rd ed. (Tehran: Markaz-i Intisharat-i ‘Ilmi va
Farhangi 1362 A.Hsh./ 1983), ghazal 776, vv. 8, 10. All translations from the Persian are
my own below, unless otherwise indicated.
32. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of
America 1983), p. 463.
33. Anatomy of Criticism, p. 120.
34. Blake: Complete Writings, ed. G. Keynes, p. 355. Cited by Kathleen Raine, “The
Human Face of God,” in James Lawrence (ed.), Testimony to the Invisible: Essays on Swe-
denborg (West Chester, PA: Chrysalis Books 1995), p. 72.
35. “The medieval world of allegory was confined to the affairs of the Hebrews.
The events recounted in the Bible were ordered as a vast message, expressed through its
literal sense but pointing towards a spiritual meaning. The spiritual had various aspects. It
was allegorical whenever the persons and events of the Old Law prefigured those of the
New Law; it was moral whenever the actions of Christ indicated how we should live; and
it was anagogical when it referred to the things of heaven.” Umberto Eco, tr. H. Bredin,
The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1988), p. 151.
36. For an overview of which, see Annebel Keeler, Sufi Hermeneutics: The Qur’an
Commentary of Rashid al-Din Maybudi (Oxford: OUP 2006), pp. 69–73.
46 Leonard Lewisohn

37. John Wansbrough, Qoranic Studies (Oxford: OUP 1977), p. 242–3, compares
these four hermeneutic degrees in Koran exegesis to the hermeneutics of the Biblical
lexicon, drawing equivalences as follows: zahir = historia; batin = allegoria; had = tropologia;
matla‘ = anagoge.
38. Cf. Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, pp. 160ff.
39. Cf. Bürgel, The Feather of Simurgh: the “Licit” Magic of the Arts in Medieval Islam
(New York: NYU Press 1988), pp. 59–60; Lewisohn, Beyond Faith and Infidelity, chap. 6.
40. Nature, Man, and Society in the 12th Century, translated from French by J. Taylor
and L. K. Little (University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 123.
41. Nature, Man, and Society in the 12th Century, p. 82. Thus, Emerson states that
the inspired poet who understands the “universality of the symbolic language” becomes
“apprised of the divineness of this superior use of things, whereby the world is a temple,
whose walls are covered with emblems, pictures and commandments of the Deity, in this,
that there is no fact in nature which does not carry the whole sense of nature; and the
distinctions we make in events, and in affairs, of high and low, honest and base, disappear
when nature is used as a symbol.” (Essay and Lectures, p. 454).
42. From The Destiny of Nations, in Ted Hughes, A Choice of Coleridge’s Verse (Lon-
don: Faber & Faber 1996), p. 217. For further discussion of this idea, see Elémire Zolla,
“The Uses of the Imagination and the Decline of the West,” Sophia Perennis, I/1 (1975),
pp. 33–59.
43. M. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harcourt Brace 1959), p. 12.
44. “Notes on the Philosophy of Persian Art,” in Roger Lipsey (ed.), Coomaraswamy:
Selected Papers, Traditional Art and Symbolism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
1977), vol. I, pp. 261–62.
45. Kulliyat-i Sa‘di, ed. Muhammad ‘Ali Furughi (Tehran: Amir Kabir 1363
A.Hsh./1984), Bustan, ch. V: story 7, pp. 327–28. Cited by Coomaraswamy, ibid., but my
own translation.
46. Edith Hamilton & Huntington Cairns (eds.), Plato: The Collected Dialogues
(Princeton: Princeton University Press 1961), Symposium, 209–212 and Phaedrus, 250c.,
pp. 497, 560–63
47. Emerson: Essays and Lectures, pp. 482–83.
48. Prometheus Unbound, III.iii, 49–56, in Shelley, Complete Poems, p. 192. For an
analysis of Neoplatonic philosophy in these verses, see Notopoulos, The Platonism of
Shelley’s Poetry, p. 254–55.
49. Anatomy of Criticism, p. 122.
50. Anatomy of Criticism, p. 125.
51. On the meaning of this technical term in Sufism see Dr. Javad Nurbakhsh,
Spiritual Poverty in Sufism, trans. Leonard Lewisohn (London: KNP 1984), ch. 6: “Meta-
physical Time,” pp. 134–39.
52. George Williamson, “Emerson the Oriental,” University of California Chronicle,
vol. XXX (1928), p. 281; cited by John Yohannan, The Persian Poet Hafiz in England and
America, MA Thesis, Columbia University (1939), p. 139.
53. Gulshan-i raz, in Majmu‘a-yi athar-i Shaykh Mahmud Shabistari, edited by Samad
Muwahhid (Tehran: Kitabkhana-i Tahuri 1986), p. 69, vv. 45–47
54. Ibid., Sa‘adat-namah, p. 169: vv. 352–53.
 English Romantics and Persian Sufi Poets 47

55. Blake: Complete Writings, ed. G. Keynes, “Milton,” 28: 62; 29: 1–3, p. 516.
I have previously compared these two passages in my Beyond Faith and Infidelity, pp.
22–23.
56. Blake: Complete Writings, p. 526; “Milton,” 35: 42–45.
57. Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley, p. 275.
58. Shelley, Complete Poems, p. 301.
59. See E. R. Dodds, Proclus: The Elements of Theology (Oxford: Clarendon Press
2000, rprt.), p. 214. Cited by Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley, p. 285.
60. From Shelley’s translation of the Symposium (211b), see Holmes, Shelley on
Love, p. 142; Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley, p. 285.
61. Divan, ed. Khanlari, no. 465: 6.
62. For a deeper comparison between Shelley’s Ahasuerus and the Muslim Khidr,
see my “From the ‘Moses of Reason’ to the ‘Khidr of the Resurrection’: the Oxymoronic
Transcendent in Shahrastani’s Majlis-i Maktub . . . dar Khwarazm,” Fortresses of the Intel-
lect: Ismaili and other Islamic Studies in Honour of Farhad Daftary, ed. Omar Ali-de-Unzaga
(London: I. B. Tauris and the Institute of Ismaili Studies 2011), Shelley, pp. 407–33.
63. Shelley, Complete Poems, Hellas, II: 792–806, p. 334.
64. These are the opening lines of his poem “Jerusalem,” in Blake: Complete Writ-
ings, ed. G. Keynes, p. 623.
65. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria: or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opin-
ions, ed. George Watson (London: Everyman 1975), ch. XIII, p. 167. On this oft-quoted
passage, see Anca Vlasopolos, The Symbolic Method of Coleridge, Baudelaire and Yeats (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press 1983), pp. 37–40. J. Robert Barth in his “Theological Impli-
cations of Coleridge’s Theory of Imagination,” in Christine Gallant (ed.), Coleridge’s Theory
of Imagination Today (New York: AMS Press 1989), p. 5, comments—I believe correctly—
that the passage implies that “the imagination is in fact a faculty of the transcendent,
capable of perceiving and in some degree articulating transcendent reality—the reality of
higher realms of being, including the divine.”
66. For a long treatment of tafakkur in the Sufi tradition, see my Beyond Faith, ch.
7: “The Thought of the Heart.”
67. Beyond Faith, p. 217.
68. Alexandre Koyré, Mystiques, Spirituels, Alchimistes due XVIème siècle allemand (Paris
1955) p. 60, n. 2; cited by Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi,
p. 179.
69. Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, p. 182.
70. See W. C. Chittick, “The World of Imagination and Poetic Imagery according
to Ibn ‘Arabi,” Temenos, X (1989), pp. 98–119. For a survey of how Corbin’s concept
of mundus imaginalis has been related to Renaissance Romantic poetics, see Marieke J.
E.Van den Doel, Wouter J. Hanegraff, “Imagination,” in Dictionary of Gnosis and Western
Esotericism, II, pp. 606–17; and also Tom Cheetham, The World Turned Inside Out: Henry
Corbin and Islamic Mysticism (Woodstock, CT: Spring Journal Books 2003), ch. 4.
71. René Wellek, “The Concept of ‘Romanticism’ in Literary History,” Comparative
Literature, I/1 (1949), pp. 1–23, 147–72. Cited by Wouter J. Hanegraaf, “Romanticism
and the Esoteric Connection,” in Roelof van den Broek and Wouter J. Hanegraaf (eds.),
Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times (Albany, NY: SUNY 1998), p. 243.
48 Leonard Lewisohn

72. Kathleen Raine, W. B.Yeats and the Learning of Imagination (Ipswich: Golgonooza
Press 1999), p. 23.
73. See Kathleen Raine, The Human Face of God: William Blake and the Book of Job
(London: Thames and Hudson 21982), p. 14.
74. See Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in Blake: Complete Writings, ed.
G. Keynes, p. 153.
75. From Blake’s Annotations to Berkeley’s Siris, in Blake: Complete Writings, ed.
G. Keynes, p. 773.
76. Raine, The Human Face of God, p. 14,
77. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. E. W. Emerson (Boston: Hought-
on Mifflin & Co. 1903–12), X, p. 243; cited by Thomas McFarland, “Imagination and Its
Cognates: Supplementary Considerations,” in Gallant (ed.), Coleridge’s Theory of Imagination
Today, p. 23.
78. Shelley, Complete Poems, p. 334 (Hellas, II: 782–84).
79. “The Poet,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures, p. 453.
80. The Mathnawí of Jalálu’ddín Rúmí, translated and edited by R. A. Nicholson
(London: E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Trust 1924–40; 2 rprt. Gibb Memorial Series N.S.
1971), II, v. 978.
81. Mathnawi, ed. Nicholson, II, vv. 1029–35.
82. E. Underhill’s classic study of Mysticism analysed this notion in much detail.
The Sufi notion of fana’ seems present in San Juan de la Cruz’s exposition of mystical
death: see George Tavard, Poetry and Contemplation in St. John of the Cross (Athens: Ohio
University Press 1988), pp. 203–07.
83. Cf. Qamar-ul Huda, “Reflections on Muslim Ascetics and Mystics: Sufi The-
ories of Annihilation and Subsistence,” in JUSUR: The UCLA Journal of Middle Eastern
Studies, 12 (1996), pp. 17–35.
84. A. H. Abdel Kader, The Life, Personality and Writings of al-Junayd (London 1962),
55. Cited by M. A. H. Ansari, “The Doctrine of One Actor: Junayd’s View of Tawhid,”
in The Muslim World (1983), p. 45.
85. A Critical Edition of the Divan of Muhammad Shirin Maghribi, edited in the
original Persian by Leonard Lewisohn with notes and an introduction by Annemarie
Schimmel (Tehran: Tehran University Press; London: SOAS Publications 1993), Ghazal
CXV. Translation mine.
86. Gulshan-i raz, for an analysis of these verses and the doctrine of the infidel
selfhood in Sufism, see my Beyond Faith, pp. 295–98.
87. Milton, I.14: 22–24, in Blake: Complete Writings, p. 495. Citing these same verses
by Blake in his article on “Intellectual Fraternity,” which compared Shakespeare with
Indian philosophies, Ananda Coomaraswamy comments that “it is significant that one
could not find in Asiatic scripture a more typically Asiatic purpose than is revealed in
his [Blake’s] passionate will to be delivered from the bondage of division.” The Dance of
Shiva (New York: Sunwise Turn, Inc. 1924), p. 113.
88. For an overview of the concept of fana’ in Sufism, see Leonard Lewisohn,
“In Quest of Annihilation: Imaginalization and Mystical Death in the Tamhidat of ‘Ayn
al-Qudat Hamadani,” in L. Lewisohn (ed.) The Heritage of Sufism, vol. I: Classical Persian
Sufism from its Origins to Rumi (700–1300) (Oxford: Oneworld 1999), pp. 284–336. See
also G. Böwering, “Baqa’ wa Fana’,” in Encyclopedia Iranica, III, pp. 722–24.
 English Romantics and Persian Sufi Poets 49

 89. Milton, II.38: 35–42, 48–49, in Blake: Complete Writings, p. 530.

 90. Mathnawi, IV: 398–99.
 91. Mathnawi, V: 796, 798.
 92. Mathnawi, V: 551–52.
 93. Adonais, LII–LIII, in Shelley, Complete Poems, p. 316. Tracing the doctrine of this
poem back to Plato, Notopoulos paraphrases these lines as follows: “Mortality is simply an
illusion like all the phenomena of nature; it is only in death that we really live and the
soul finds its true home in the Platonic reality above and beyond the physical world” (The
Platonism of Shelley, p. 291). He also points out (ibid., p. 301) that these verses are modelled
on this passage (68b) in Plato’s Phaedo; “Surely, there are many who have chosen of their
own free will to follow dead lovers and wives and sons to the next world, in the hope
of seeing them and meeting there the persons whom they loved. If this is so, will a true
lover of wisdom who has firmly grasped this same conviction—that he will never attain
to wisdom worthy of the name elsewhere than in the next world—will he be grieved
at dying? Will he not be glad to make that journey? We must suppose so, dear boy, that
is, if he is a real philosopher, because he will be of firm belief that he will never find
wisdom in all its purity in any other place” (trans. from Plato: The Collected Dialogues, p. 50).
 94. Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, tr. Sears Jayne
(Woodstock, Conn.: Spring Publications 1985), VI.10, pp. 125ff.
 95. Jill Line, Shakespeare and the Fire of Love (London: Shepheard-Walwyn 2004),
pp. 70–71.
  96. Cited by Kathleen Raine, Defending Ancient Springs (Suffolk: Golgonooza Press
1985), p. 173.
 97. This Platonic doctrine in this sonnet is commented on by both Raine and
Line (cited in the previous two notes), and also underlined by most scholars of the
sonnets: see, e.g., Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press 1997), p. 258, and Stephen Booth, Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Edited with an
Analytic Commentary (New Haven: Yale University Press 2000), p. 224.
 98. In a letter to a friend, Shelley explained the mystical nature of the poem’s
inspiration as follows: “The Epipsychidion is a mystery; as to real flesh and blood, you might
as well go to a gin-shop for a leg of mutton, as to expect anything human or earthly
from me.” Percy Bysshe Shelley, Complete Poems (London: Softback Preview 1993), p. 298.
 99. In Holmes, ed., Shelley on Love, p. 197.
100. In Holmes, ed., Shelley on Love, p. 209.
101. Richard White, Love’s Philosophy (New York: Rowman & Littlefield 2001), p.
56. See also Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley, p. 288 on these lines.
102. See ibid.
103. Mathnawi,V: 372–74.
104. See R. J. W. Austin, “The Sophianic Feminine in the Work of Ibn ‘Arabi and
Rumi,” in L. Lewisohn, ed. The Heritage of Sufism, vol. 2: The Legacy of Mediæval Persian
Sufism (Oxford: Oneworld 1999), pp. 233–45.
105. For an overview of such doctrines of love, see my “Romantic Love in Islam,”
in Encyclopædia of Love in World Religions, ed. Yudit Greenberg (New York: Macmillan
Reference & Thomson Gale 2007), vol. II, pp. 513–15.
106. Fakhruddin ‘Iraqi, Divine Flashes, tr. William Chittick and Peter Wilson (Lon-
don: SPCK 1982), pp. 118–19.
50 Leonard Lewisohn

107. Epipsychidion, vv. 573–4.

108. Shelley, Adonais, LII, in Complete Poems, p. 316; see Notopoulos, The Platonism
of Shelley, pp. 297–301 for a good study of the Platonic doctrines in these famous lines.
109. Mathnawi-yi ma‘nawi, V: 988–91.
110. See Akhtar Qamber, “The Mirror Symbol in the Teachings and Writings of
Some Sufi Masters,” Temenos, XI (1990), pp. 163–79; Jacquelyn Bralove, “The Mirror in
Sufi Poetry, Sufi, 20 (1993), pp. 29–32.
111. ‘Iraqi, Divine Flashes, trans. Chittick/Wilson, Flash V, pp. 81–82.
112. Yusuf va Zulaykha, in Jami, Mathnawi-yi haft awrang, ed. A‘la khan Afdahrad
and Husayn A. Tarbiyat (Tehran: Nashr-i Mirath-i Maktub 1378 A.Hsh./1999), vol. 2, pp.
34–36, particularly vv. 324–337, where he speaks of the pre-Eternal Beauty’s reflection
in the mirrors of created beings, “for it is Her Beauty that everywhere appears / She’s
the One behind the veil of everyone beloved” (v. 334).
113. “Adonais,” LII, LIV, in Shelley, Complete Poems, p. 316.
114. Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley, p. 281.
115. See A. Schimmel, A Two-Coloured Brocade: the Imagery of Persian Poetry (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1992), p. 102.
116. In Somnium Scipionis, I, 14. Cited by Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, p.
139. On various aspects of the mirror motif in Islamic thought, see J. C. Bürgel, Feather
of Simurgh, pp. 138–58.
117. Diwan-i Khwajah Shams al-Din Muhammad Hafiz, ed. Parviz Natil Khanlari
(Tehran: Intisharat-i Khawarazmı̄ 1359 A.Hsh./1980), ghazal 148: 1.
118. My interpretation of Hafiz’s verse is based on Baha’ al-Din Khurramshahi’s
commentary on this poem. See his Hafiz-namah: sharh-i alfaz, i‘lam, mafahim-i kilidi va
abyat-i dushvar-i Hafiz (Tehran: Intisharat-i Surush 1372 A.Hsh./1993), I, p. 600.
119. Love’s Labour Lost, IV.3, 346–49.
120. Pseudo-Dionysius: the Complete Works, trans. by Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem
(New York: Paulist Press 1987), 701D–704A, pp. 76–77.
121. Umberto Eco, tr. Hugh Bredin, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (New Haven:
Yale University Press 1986), p. 18.
122. On the Platonic doctrine derived from Ficino in these verses, see Line, op.
cit., pp. 1–12.
123. Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, V: 6, p. 95.
124. “Romanticism,” in Wouter J. Hanegraaff (ed.), Dictionary of Gnosis and Western
Esotericism (Leiden: Brill 2005), II, pp. 1003–04.
125. Traditionalist approaches to this concept appear in the classic work by F.
Schuon, The Transcendental Unity of Religions (London: Theosophical Publishing House
1984) and S. H. Nasr, “Principial Knowledge and the Multiplicity of Sacred Forms,” in
idem., Knowledge and the Sacred (Albany, NY: SUNY 1989), pp. 280–308. On the theory
of the transcendental unity of religions in Sufism, see my “The Transcendental Unity
of Polytheism and Monotheism in the Sufism of Shabistari,” in L. Lewisohn (ed.), The
Heritage of Sufism, II, pp. 379–406.
126. From Baha’ al-Din Muhammad al-‘Amili, Kulliyat-i ash‘ar va athar-i farsi Shaykh
Baha’i, ed. ‘Ali Katibi (Tehran: Nashr-i Chakāma, n.d.), p. 348. Translation mine.
127. Husayn ‘Ali Haravi, Sharh-i ghazalha-yi Hafiz (Tehran: Nashr-i Naw 1367
A.Hsh./1988), I, p. 365.
 English Romantics and Persian Sufi Poets 51

128. An allusion to a famous hadith of the Prophet: “Verily, after me my community

will be subdivided into seventy-three different sects, out of which one will be saved, and
the seventy-two others will be in hell.”
129. Diwan-i . . . Hafiz, ed. Khanlari, ghazal 179.
130. Diwan-i . . . Hafiz, ed. Khanlari, ghazal 78: 3. Tr. Robert Bly and Leonard
Lewisohn.
131. The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longmans 1969), pp.
139–43; cited by Parvin Loloi, “Tennyson, Fitzgerald, and Cowell: A Private Relationship
with Public Consequences,” in Sabine Coelsch-Foisner, Holger Klein (eds.), Private and
Public Voices in Victorian Poetry (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag 2000), pp. 15–16.
132. Cited by Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, Akbar and Religion (Dehli: Idarah-i Adabi-
yat-i-Dehli 1989), p. 210. Translation mine. For the original see Kulliyat-i ‘Urfi Shirazi,
ed. Muhammad Vali al-Haqq Ansari (Tehran: Tehran University Press 1378 A.Hsh./1999),
vol. 1, p. 116.
133. Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand (London: John Murray 1973–
82), vol. III, p. 199; cited by Mohammed Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism
(London: I. B. Tauris 1994), p. 237.
134. See Bernard Blackstone, “Byron and Islam: the triple Eros,” Journal of European
Studies, IV (1970), pp. 325–63.
135. H. Javadi, “Persian Literary Influence on English Literature,” Indo-Iranica,
XXVI/1 (1973), p. 22.
136. Blackstone, “Byron and Islam: the triple Eros,” p. 350.
137. Blake: Complete Writings, p. 98.
138. See L. Lewisohn, “Sufism and the School of Isfahan: Tasawwuf and ‘Irfan in
Late Safavid Iran (‘Abd al-Razzaq Lahiji and Fayd-i Kashani on the Relation of Tasaw-
wuf, Hikmat and ‘Irfan,’)” in L. Lewisohn and D. Morgan (eds.), The Heritage of Sufism,
vol. III: Late Classical Persianate Sufism: the Safavid and Mughal Period (Oxford: Oneworld
1999), pp. 63–134. Cf. More’s defence of “Liberty of Conscience,” in David Mullan, ed.,
Religious Pluralism in the West (Oxford: Blackwell 1998), pp. 159–65. The doctrine of the
Cambridge Platonists on the subject was latter versified by Alexander Pope (d. 1744) in
his Essay on Man (IV, 307–09):

For Modes of Faith, let graceless zealots fight;

His can’t be wrong whose life is in the right:
In Faith and Hope the world will disagree
But all Mankind’s concern is Charity:
All must be false that thwart that One great End
And all of God, that bless Mankind and mend.

139. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1974),
III, p. 52.
140. Mariyn Butler, “Romanticism in England,” in Roy Porter, Mikulás (eds.),
Romanticism in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988), p. 59.
141. See Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism, introduction.
142. M.J. Ahmad, Persian Poetry and the English Reader from the Eighteenth to the
Twentieth Century (M.Litt diss., University of Newcastle 1971), p. 41.
52 Leonard Lewisohn

143. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New

York: Norton & Co. 1971).
144. H. Corbin, “Traditional Knowledge and Spiritual Renaissance,” trans. Kathleen
Raine, Temenos Academy Review, I (1998), pp. 37–38.
145. An interesting essay which applies Corbin’s notion of the Islamic mundus
imaginalis to English and American literature of the Romantic period is David Mitch-
ell, “Nature as Theophany,” Temenos: A Journal Devoted to the Arts of the Imagination, VII
(1986), pp. 95–114.
146. Divan-i Hakim Abu’l-Majdud ibn Adam Sana’i Ghaznavi, ed. Mudarris Radavi
(Tehran: Intisharat-i Kitabkhana-i Sana’i 1362 A.Hsh./1983), p. 52. Jabalqa and Jabarsa
are cities of the subtle world of the Imagination. Jabalqa is the mundus archetypus located
to the East, an interworld between the visible and supersensory worlds, containing all
the archetypes of the universe. Jabarsa is located in the West, and is the world of Image-
exemplars: the interworld in which Spirits dwell after they have left the terrestrial realm.
See Henry Corbin (trans. N. Pearson), Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: from Mazdean Iran
to Shi‘ite Iran (London: I. B. Tauris 1990; reprint of the Princeton University 1976 ed.), pp.
160–61. (Jabalqa corresponds roughly to Blake’s Beulah and Jabarsa to his Golgonooza).
 The Master:
Emerson and Sufism
 2

The Chronological Development of

Emerson’s Interest in Persian Mysticism1

Mansur Ekhtiyar

When Emerson recognized the beauty of Oriental thought, his interest in Per-
sian poetry and Persian mysticism began to develop. For the sake of clarity, the
process and the growth of his contact with the Orient in general, and with
Persians in particular, are shown chronologically.
In 1820, at the age of seventeen when he was in college, he pointed out,
“All tends to the mysterious East . . . from the time of the first dispersion of the
human family to the Grecian rise.”2 In the year 1820, however, there seems hardly
any influence of the East traceable in his writing, even though there are hints of
its mysteriousness, the unknown Oriental thought, in the Journals and in the Letters.
When Emerson was in college from 1817 to 1821, he expressed an ambi-
tion to compose a long masterly poem entitled “Asia”; but he never brought his
wish to fulfillment.3 He always defined Asia as a land of “unity” and Europe as
the world of “variety.”4 He even grew to love the Orient so ideally that later
he called his wife, Lidian Emerson, “Mine Asia.”
Before 1820 only a few general allusions to the East are found in the
Journals. His first contact with Persian thought was with the Zend Avesta in which
he retained his interest throughout his life. He consulted different versions of this
Zoroastrian Bible in German, French, and English. Perhaps he was anxious to
compare some of the Avesta scriptures with the original versions in Pahlavi or
Avestai, for on two or three occasions he checked out books in ancient Persian
from the Boston Athenaeum5 and studied them for several months.
In October 1820, he recorded in the Journals, “I begin to believe in the
Indian doctrine of eye fascination.”6 On July 6, 1822, he wrote a soliloquy on
God, and at the end of it he quoted Sir William Jones’s translation of Narayena.7
From 1822 onward Emerson maintained an interest in this English translator and
eminent statesman. He was impressed by Joseph Dennie’s assertion in the Gazette

55
56 Mansur Ekhtiyar

of the United States (1800), in which he mentioned Sir William Jones, along with
Swift, as an Englishman whose literary achievements American scholars would
do well to imitate.
In 1823, after reading Arabian Nights, Emerson wrote to his Aunt Mary,
who shared his interest in the Orient, and referred to Indian thought. A few
days earlier he had received a warm letter from her concerning a visit from an
Oriental gentleman, who showed her a fine representation of the incarnation
of Vishnu, and in a later letter, Mary sent him a few lines of poetry from Sir
William Jones’s “Hymn to Narayena.”8
Early in 1823, when he was in his twenties, he addressed a significant
letter to his Aunt Mary containing a question which had in it the germ of the
Orientalism manifest in all of his most mature thought.9
Robert Southey’s “The Curse of Kehama” (1810) had an important influ-
ence on Emerson during his Harvard years, not so much for the poem itself as
for the rich background notes and quotations which Southey placed at the end
of the work. It is not surprising that such a harvest of Oriental lore continued
to interest Emerson even after his college days. Evidence of this interest may be
found in a short story which Emerson composed for his pupils in 1823, based
upon extracts from Mark Wilk’s Historical Sketches of the South of India. Emerson’s
adaptation, intended for young women, romanticized the original, removed sexual
implications, and purged certain details. He clearly read the Sketches with care;
they should certainly be considered a part of his accumulated knowledge of
the Orient. Southey’s bibliography, as reconstructed by Kenneth W. Cameron, is
beneficial for the traces of Emerson’s experience of the East.10 Arthur Christy
reaffirms that the sacred books of the Orient, including those of the Persians,
were sources of influence that shaped Emerson’s understanding of the East.11
Late in 1823, Emerson contrasted Sir Isaac Newton, as representative of
the Occident, and Juggernaut, as symbolic of the East, in favor of the former,
stating that the admiration of a few observers to the intellectual supremacy of
one page will hardly be counted, in the eye of the philanthropists, as an atone-
ment for the squalid and desperate ignorance of untold millions who breathe
the breath of misery in Asia, in Africa, and all over the globe. Emerson, in fact,
did not study much about the Orient in 1823, but he resumed his investigation
in the following year.
Early in 1824, he pointed out that he was eager not to live in isolation,
or to be “contemptible in a corner.”12 In this light he composed his “Asia,” in
which he expressed the view that “Asia is not dead, but sleepeth.”

Asia

Sleep on, ye drowsy tribes whose old repose

The roaring oceans of the East enclose;
 Emerson’s Interest in Persian Mysticism 57

Old Asia, nurse of man, and bower of gods,

The dragon Tyranny with crown and ball
Chants to thy dreams his ancient lullaby.13

At the same time Emerson speaks of the contrast of the modern noisy
world with Asia’s peaceful solitude. He addresses Americans, saying that Europe
is their father and “they should bear him on their Atlantean shoulders, but Asia
is thy grand desire and should give him his freedom.”14
In 1829, he read Marie Josef de Gernado’s Histoire Comparée des systèmes de
philosophie, and he acquired a taste for the Bhagavat from Victor Cousin’s Cours
de philosophie. Emerson read these books because he was interested in having
a clear idea concerning the Oriental approach to the “Over-Soul,” “Fate,” and
the concept of “Free-will.”
Late in 1830 he read Gernado’s publication again; it was there that he had
been introduced to the philosophy of the various schools of thought in India
and ancient Persia. Through these works Gernado compiled, Emerson entered
the path that led him to the springs of the religion and philosophy in the Ori-
ent.15 From the four volumes of Gernado, he extracted enough material to fill
fifteen pages of the Journals.16
In 1831, he was impressed with the philosophy of Plotinus and by its effects
on Oriental thought. While Plotinus’s work is covered in his reading list for that
year, he probably read some of Plotinus’s ideas in Gernado. Emerson’s interest
in Plotinus arose when he discovered the close kinship between Neoplatonism
and Oriental thought. 1831 was, in fact, the year in which he seriously began
the study of Neoplatonic philosophy, and his interest in Zoroastrianism, which
had already started during his college days, developed in a parallel manner. On
April 17, 1832 Emerson wrote about “Persian Scriptures.” He asserts that “a
strong poem is Zoroastrianism.”17
The parallelism of Emerson’s study and his interest in Neoplatonism and
Orientalism are significant and quite easily traceable. Late in 1832, Emerson
asserted that Plato’s forms or ideas seem almost tantamount to the “Fravashi”
of Zoroaster, which are the symbols of good action, good thought, and good
words. Then he added that of all the “Ferours” of beings that should exist in
the world, the most precious in the eyes of Ormuzd (Ahura Mazda), were that
of Law, that of Iran, and that of Zoroaster. In the journal entry for July (1832),
he quoted a passage from Academie des Inscriptions:18

“Fire,” the sun of Ormuzd, was also created. He represented, though

imperfectly, the original “fire” which animates all beings, forms the
relations which exist between them and which in the beginning was
a principle of union between Ormuzd and time.
58 Mansur Ekhtiyar

In 1832 Emerson composed a scholarly article concerning the character

of Zartosht, or Zoroaster, whom he praised highly in his Journals on various
occasions when he happened to mention Oriental men of character.
In 1834, he listed the Chinese Sheking in his reading list and he spoke of
the Vedas in his Journals. Late in 1836, he studied The Code of Manu19 and an
account of the extracts from Confucius. He had already read Arabian Proverbs
late in 1834; but he studied it again in 1836.
In 1836, Emerson also studied Hindu philosophy from different sources.20
The Avesta (Zend-Avesta de Zoroaster) was perhaps one of the earliest books of
Oriental philosophy he studied; the Manu was the second, and it was from this
text that he quoted a passage for the motto of the first edition of Nature.
Early in 1837, Emerson read a steadily increasing number of Oriental
books: Chalidasa, the Code of Manu, Zoroaster’s Zend-Avesta, the sayings of the
Buddha, the Vedas, the Koran, and the Vishu Sarna.21 Emerson read some of the
Persian Divans (anthologies) in German and some Persian poems in English in
The Asiatic Journal, but he did not mention them in his reading list for 1837.
From 1839 to 1840 Emerson read more Neoplatonism than Oriental
thought. The idea of “transmigration of souls” so impressed him that he reflected
on it in his essay History.22 However, in his Journals he spoke of his appreciation
of the Buddhists ‘understanding of laws of friendship. While Emerson was discuss-
ing friendship, he mentioned the laws of hospitality among Buddhists, touching
on the fact that they do not believe in “flattering benefactors.”23
Emerson’s reading of Oriental material introduced him to Akhlaq-i Jalali
(Jalalian Ethics), a mystical handbook translated into English in 1839. It is a
reference which shows the way in which the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle
were introduced to Persian mysticism. Emerson read the translation of Akhlaq-i
Jalali by W. F. Thomson, published in early 1839. Akhlaq-i Jalali was written about
1467–1477 by Jalal al-Din Davani (1410–1488), who wrote the book for Owzan
Hassan Aq-Ghoyenlu. The book contains discussions on ethics, politics, and phi-
losophy. He also read Samuel Miller, who had written a chapter about Persian
language and literature, in which he stated that the study of Persian thought was
an object of considerable attention in America during the eighteenth century;24
and it was, of course, during Emerson’s time to a large degree.
On May 4, 1840, Emerson wrote to Margaret Fuller about his recent
readings and the impressions that he acquired from the Zoroastrian style.25
In 1841, Emerson’s first series of Essays appeared in which there were
only a few vague references to the East. Later in that year his interest in Persian
thought grew to such an extent that he read many verses of Persian poetry in
the German translation of von Hammer-Purgstall.26
Beginning about 1837, he read more and more Oriental ideas until, in
1845, he became an Orientalist in earnest.
 Emerson’s Interest in Persian Mysticism 59

Early in 1841, in the essay Compensation, he furnished himself with mate-

rial for the essay Fate. The change in title and point of view in the two essays
is largely due to the progress of his Oriental reading. Emerson also showed his
antagonism toward the concept of fate, which he found among Arabian poets
and some Persians. He was quite aware of the fact that “fate” and “no free
will” had different connotations to a Persian mystic. To a Sufi, the will of God
is called “love.” A lover follows the will of the Beloved, so his “will” is always
the will of the Divine. Shams of Tabriz, the teacher of Rumi (d. 1273) and a
Sufi of the thirteenth century, who is called Shami in the present study, asserts:

They say, “What is love?” Say “Renunciation of the will,”

Who so has not escaped from will, no will hath he.27

In Spiritual Law, Emerson suggests a view quite similar to that of Rumi’s

concept of “will.” He says that a little consideration of what takes place around
us every day would show us that a higher law than that of our will regulates
events that our painful labors are unnecessary and fruitless. He adds that there
is a soul at the center of nature over the will of every man, so that none of us
can wrong the universe.28
It is necessary here to note Emerson’s and the Persian mystics’ distinction
between “private will,” which is, in reality, “willingness and self-annihilation,” and
the “Divine will,” which is the “eternal tendency to the good of the whole,”
active in every atom and every moment. Late in 1841, Emerson’s interest was
drawn to the doctrine of “Beautiful Necessity” and to the notion of Destiny;
his eagerness led him again to the concept of “variety” in Hinduism and to
Oriental mysticism.
In a Journal entry for 1841, he records that he found an analogy to
the fact of life in the Asiatic sentences and that the Oriental genius has no
dramatic or epic turn,29 but that antiethical contemplative delights in it as in
Zoroastrian Oracles, in the Vedas, and in Manu.30 Emerson is not quite correct
in this statement, because Firdawsi, the most famous epic writer of Persia, who
lived ten centuries ago and was appreciated by Emerson for his fabulous tales,
is an exception to this rule. Very late in 1841, for the first time in his Journals,
Emerson shared the appreciation of Hafiz’s thought, his Divine ecstasy, his eternal
pride, and his boundless joy.
In a journal entry for 1842, Emerson writes of Sa‘di that he celebrates
the omnipotence of a virtuous Soul. When Emerson’s interest in Persian mystic
thought developed in the early 1840s, he wrote his poem “Saadi” for The Dial
(1842). It is one of his longest poems—about 176 lines—and is, at the same
time, one of his finest compositions, whose truth to its subject and poetic
organization are of considerable importance. In later years, Emerson appears to
60 Mansur Ekhtiyar

have been stimulated by Hafiz, whom he named “the prince of Persian poets”—
even though Sa‘di was his first love. Indeed, he adapted his name in its various
modifications for the ideal poet, and under it described his own language and
his most intimate experience. In whatever way Emerson came on Sa‘di’s verse,
his Letters show that he did not know The Gulistan until 1848 and in that year
wrote in his Journal that he found in Sa‘di’s Gulistan many traits which compare
favorably to the portrait he drew. In the beginning of “Saadi” Emerson defines
his character:

Yet Saadi loved the race of men,—

No churl, immured in cave or den;
. . . 
But he has no companion;
Come ten, or come a million,
Good Saadi dwells alone.31

Early in 1843 Emerson wrote of Sa‘di that, like Homer, Dante, and Chau-
cer, he possessed a great advantage over poets of cultivated times, as the rep-
resentative of thought to his countrymen.32 By this time Emerson was quite
familiar with the mystical terminology of the Orient. He spoke of Sa‘di on
different occasions and introduced him as a Sacayi (or saqqa), or water-drawer
in the Holy Land, until he was found worthy of an introduction to the prophet
Khizr,33 who moistened his mouth with the water of immortality (Kousar). C.
F. Strauch has discovered that Emerson confused the prophet Khizr (Khezr) in
the original account, with the fountain Keuser (Kousar), which is the spring
of immortality.34 In a journal entry for 1843, Emerson refers to an interesting
tale of Persian literature in which Amir Khusraw-yi Dehlavi (Emerson spells his
name Delhi), asked for a mouthful of this inspiring beverage, but was told that
Sa‘di had received the last sip.35
From 1842 to 1843 Emerson joined with Thoreau in publishing a series of
“Ethical Scriptures” from the sacred books of the Orient in The Dial. The idea
came to them under the influence of Neoplatonism. At this time Emerson spoke
of Oriental mysticism and of Swedenborg’s contact with the mystical thought
of the East and of Neoplatonism. In this year his attention was especially drawn
to the philosophy of Proclus. It appears that of all the Platonic philosophers, he
loved Proclus next only to Plato himself. In a journal entry for 1843, he asserts:

I take many stimulants and often make an art of my inebriation.

I read Proclus for my opium; it excites my imagination to let sail
before me the pleasing and grand figures of Gods and daemons and
demonical men.36
 Emerson’s Interest in Persian Mysticism 61

In 1844 the second series of Essays was published, in which there were
comparatively few and vague reminiscences of his Oriental views. Emerson uses
the same language in speaking of Shakespeare and Hafiz and of Homer and
Sa‘di, joining them all together; because both Hafiz and Shakespeare expressed
for him “hilarity,” “divine ecstasy,” “joy,” and gave emancipation; and both Homer
and Sa‘di “lay in the sun.”37 The expression “the Poet,” used often in different
passages speaking of the Orient, seems to be an allusion to Hafiz, whom he
equates with Shakespeare.
Late in 1844, Emerson praised the Oriental serenity and, in a journal entry
for this year, said of Hafiz and Sa‘di that “some men have the perception of
difference predominant, and are conversant with surfaces and trifles, with coats,
coaches, faces and cities; these are the men of talent . . . And other men abide
by the perception of Identity; these are the Orientals, the philosophers, the men
of faith and divinity, the men of genius.”38
The year 1845 was the time of Emerson’s most enthusiastic Oriental
reading. There are two passages in the Journals dealing with the central idea of
“Brahma.” He versified one passage in the Journals and gave its prose form in
Plato; or the Philosopher (1845), in which he mentioned that among secular books
only Plato is entitled to the fanatical compliment of Omar to the Qur’an, when
Omar, the second Kaliph of Islam, said, “Burn the libraries; for their value is
in this book.”39
Late in 1845, Emerson translated two interesting verses from the Vedas,
and some from the Avesta from German sources. He mentioned two verses of
them in Plato; or the Philosopher. There are clear allusions to Rumi,40 one of the
eminent Persian mystics, when Emerson uses the metaphoric Sufi terms, “flute”
and “river” in this essay:

As one diffusive air, passing through the perforations of a flute, is

distinguished as the notes of a scale, so the nature of the Great Spirit
is single, though its forms be manifold, arising from the consequences
of acts.41

Emerson’s predominant tone in Illusion is Oriental, not a direct influence

of Greek or Neoplatonic philosophy. Late in 1845, he tried to read Machia-
velli’s histories to apply their philosophy to further understand his [Emerson’s]
mystic concept of illusion and fate; but, as he has stated, he found it difficult to
read and understand. In August 1845, he read it again, and studied Hindu and
Zoroastrian teachings alongside it. In an entry in his Journals for this year, he
writes, “Yes, the Zoroastrian, the Indian, the Persian scriptures are majestic, and
more to our daily purpose than this year’s almanac or this day’s newspaper.”42
Rather late in 1845, his interest in Persian mysticism and in its origin seemed
62 Mansur Ekhtiyar

to amount to an enthusiasm, for in this year alone his Journals contain references
to and quotations from the Orient.
In July 27, 1846, Emerson wrote to Elizabeth Hoar, mentioning that he
had recently written some verses called Mithridates, others called Merlin, others
called Alphonso of Castille, and some called Bacchus; they were not, however,
translated from Hafiz.43 At the same time he pointed out in the Journals that
“Hafiz, whom I at first thought a cross of Anacreon and Horace, I find now to
have the best blood of Pindar in his veins. Also of Burns.”44
Bacchus had been written in July 1848, only a few days before he wrote
to his friends about it. In his own copy of The Poems, he wrote a motto to
Bacchus, which is taken from Plato: “The man who is his own master knocks in
vain at the doors of poetry.” The influence of Hafiz’s ecstasy is quite traceable
in Bacchus, though it is not a translation of a Hafiz sonnet.
J. I. Harrison has asserted that Hafiz used “wine” as a theme for verse, but
its symbolic use in Emerson’s poem is purely Platonic.45 Bacchus, explains Proclus,
is the mundane intellect from which the soul and the body of the world are
suspended. But the theologians, he adds, frequently call Bacchus “wine,” from
the last of his gifts.46 Wine, both to Emerson and to Hafiz, is a symbol of the
spiritual ecstasy in which Hafiz’s sonnets were written. Emerson is quite aware
that Hafiz’s use of wine, roses, maidens, birds, rivers, flutes, tubas, mushk (the
perfume of the Beloved), moles (attraction of the Divinity), taverns or meikhane
(the place of emanation), and the veil (a hindrance which falls between the Man
and the Over-Soul) are symbolic and that Hafiz praises them to give vent to
his immense response to joy and beauty. In 1845, Emerson expressed the same
idea in Experience and defined wine as a vehicle to elevate Man from one level
to another.47 When Emerson speaks about a movement toward a higher spiritual
level in Bacchus, he, in fact, considers wine to be a wine of reminiscence. Late
in 1846, he spoke of poetry as “God’s wine” and then he added in Poetry and
Imagination:

O celestial Bacchus! drive them mad. . . . every man may be, and at

the same time a man is, lifted to a platform whence he looks beyond
sense to moral and spiritual truth, and in that mood deals sovereignly
with matter, and strings worlds like beads upon his thought.48

There are numerous allusions to wine in the Works, the Essays, and the
Journals, which all suggest the concept of divine ecstasy. In Persian Poetry, he
quotes this line from Hafiz:

I will be drunk and down with wine;

Treasure we find in a ruined house.49
 Emerson’s Interest in Persian Mysticism 63

Emerson reminds us that love, or the wine of Hafiz, is not to be confused

with a vulgar debauch. It is the spirit in which the song is written with full joy.
While Edward Browne of Cambridge interprets “Hafiz’s wine” to be a physical
wine, the allusion to wine is merely divine wine and purely a symbolic wine of
emancipation; especially owing to the metaphorical use of “loosen the knots:”

O will it be that they will reopen the doors of the taverns,

And will loosen the knots from tangled affairs?
Cut the tresses of the harp [in mourning] for the death of pure wine,
So that all the sons of Magians may loosen their curled locks!50

We may conclude that the wine for which Hafiz and Emerson pray
becomes the divinely intoxicated intellect, which is to float through all being;
this intoxication is only the inspiration that the true poet should have. Charles
Molly appreciates the concept of symbolic wine and calls Bacchus the best poem
written by Emerson. He believes Bacchus is one of the world’s greatest poems,
the one in which the highest degree of emancipation is penetrated.51 The tone
of the freedom and of exaltation in Bacchus is similar to that of Hafiz’s sonnets.
As Carpenter says, three lines of the poem are perhaps as fine as any Emerson
over wrote:

Wine that is shed

Like the torrents of the Sun
Up the horizon walls.52

There is, in fact, a considerable influence of the Persian style of versification

in Bacchus that is apparent in every line. Joel Benton suggests that Emerson
blends some of his principles with the joy, ecstasy, and exaltation of Hafiz. The
thought of Bacchus is Emersonian; he holds, but it appears that the spirit and
the mystical terms are Oriental, therefore, Bacchus, Benton says, is the result of
these combinations. In Emerson in Concord Edward Emerson wrote:

Another influence now came in on the side of grace and finish, the
Oriental poetry, in which he [Ralph Waldo Emerson] took very great
interest, especially the poems of Hafiz, many of which he rendered
into English from the German or French translation in which he
found them.53

Several critics have made attempts to find out the sonnet of Hafiz from
which Bacchus originated. There are many conjectures, most of them bearing
some pertinence and marked by a great deal of similarity. W. R. Alger’s discovery
64 Mansur Ekhtiyar

is interesting. He suggests that while Emerson was composing Bacchus, he was

inspired by a ghazal of Hafiz entitled Bring Me Wine.54 To a certain extent, one
finds justification for Alger’s view; nevertheless, it appears that Emerson was most
influenced by the long poem of Hafiz, entitled Wine or The Saqi55 Song, which
is too long to be called a sonnet or a ghazal.56 There are other indications to
back up this hypothesis. J. D. Yohannan, in his article, The Influence of Persian
Poetry on Emerson’s Work in American Literature,57 has also supported this view. In
1842 Emerson was fascinated by the Persian mystic term Saki or Saqi, while he
was versifying his poem “Saadi.”58 Besides, there are similar mystic metaphors,
comparable verse structure, and repetition of words in Bacchus similar to those
in The Saki Song, such as “wine,” saqi,” “pour,” and “intoxication.” Therefore, one
may conclude that while Emerson was composing Bacchus he was influenced by
The Saki Song (Saqi Namah).59 Late in 1847 he wrote to Edward Bangs:

For you must allow me an affectionate expression—me so far off

and you so young,—I take the first moment that really serves me
to recite the title of the book I neglected to send you before leav-
ing home—and which is, as follows: Der Dievan von Mohammed
Schemseddin Hafiz.60

Again in 1847 he mentioned in his Journals that he had translated about

twenty lines of Hafiz, which are from one of the finest Hafiz poems. It appears
that on the eve of Emerson’s forty-fourth birthday he recited a few lines of his
translation and later, on May 15, 1847, spoke of Hafiz and tried to symbolize
him as the right example of “freedom expresser.” Emerson declares, “The proud-
est speech that free will ever made is in Hafiz’[s] Divan:”

It stands written on the Gate of Heaven

Woe to him who suffers himself to be betrayed by the Fate.61

Rather late in 1847, Emerson read Firdawsi’s Shah Namah (The Book of
Kings); he checked out two versions of this book from two libraries within four
months. He was interested, perhaps, in comparing two or three translations, in
verifying the fabulous tales in this heroic book. Late in this year he read more
of Hafiz and consulted the Divans of Sa‘di, and Farid al-Din Attar in Chadzko’s
translation of Specimens of Ancient Persian Poetry. In September, in the Journals, he
discussed the concept of transition and its nature. Here he points out that Hafiz
is characterized by a perfect intellectual emancipation, which he also provokes
in the reader. Further on, he notes that nothing stops Hafiz, that he makes the
“dare-God,” and “dare-Devil” experiment. Emerson adds that Hafiz is not to be
scared by a name or a religion; he fears nothing.62
 Emerson’s Interest in Persian Mysticism 65

Late in this year the rough drafts of Song of Nature and Days appeared,
(they were published in 1852) in which one finds several allusions to Oriental
mysticism like “mirror images.” It is, therefore, worthwhile to stress the influence
of Persian material and its mystical entities on Emerson’s thought; especially
because shortly after his entry on “the beauty in the mythology of Arabia,” he
was fascinated by the legendary epic tales of Firdawsi. Late that year Emerson
extracted Sufi terms from Persian poems translated into German and used them
in his writings. Persian mystic terms like “the Tuba” or “der Lieblingsbaum des
Paradieses,” and the fountain Keuser (as I have noted before, Emerson confused
the name of the prophet Khizr with this holy fountain) appeared in his writ-
ings. Emerson refers also to the Seal of Solomon, the magic ring that symbolizes
lordship over human beings, animals, and demons. The Anka (Anqa or Simorgh
is roughly equivalent to Griffin or Phoenix), the fabulous bird of wisdom, men-
tioned by Firdawsi in the Shah Namah, represented the kingdom of the birds at
the court of Solomon, but Anqa was eventually withdrawn and banished to the
mythical mountain of Kof (Qaf). These fabulous mystical tales engaged Emerson’s
mind during the whole period from 1847 to late 1850.63 Very late in 1847,
Emerson spoke of an Oriental tale to suggest the idea for Oriental Superlative
in which he spoke of the story of Khoja Yakul, who brought to Kurraglu the
miniature of the handsome Aynas. Incidentally, the dialogue between Kurraglu
and a shepherd, who came into the picture of the story afterward, so attracted
Emerson that he quoted more than two pages of their conversation in the
Journals.64 In The Transcendentalists and Minerva, Kenneth W. Cameron refers to
this fabulous story, and notes that the book is written by Abdulkurreem (Abdu’l
Karim), and is called The Memoirs of Khojeh Abdulkureem, which was translated
into English by Francis Gladwin in 1788.
From 1849 through 1850 Emerson read some of the interesting Persian
poems more fully in the German anthology of von Hammer-Purgstall, and to
a certain extent in Chadzko’s Specimens of Ancient Persian Poetry. Emerson had
previously been in contact with these two anthologies early in the 1840s. In
early 1850 he began to keep a separate journal entitled The Orientalist. In this
journal he brought together the philosophy of the Hindus, Oriental thought,
Persian poetry, and the wisdom of the Oriental lands. In this year he studied the
Account of the Writings of Hinds, Firdawsi’s the Shah Namah, and several Divans
(anthologies) of Persian poets, most of which were checked out from the Boston
Athanaeum Library during the period of 1849 and early 1850.
In 1851, he concentrated on Persian mystic poets and translated several
fragments from them for The Atlantic Monthly and for The Liberty Bell. Among
the verses in his second volume of poetry, which was entitled May Day and
Other Poems (1867), he placed two translations from Hafiz (these poems were
omitted from the Selected Poems and neglected by J. F. Cabot in his Revised
66 Mansur Ekhtiyar

Edition). Joel Benton, who has compared some quatrains of Hafiz65 with what
Emerson translated, has asserted that the translation of Hafiz’s pieces, reflected
in the Poems of the Centenary Edition (1918), seemed to him a little more like
Emerson than Hafiz. In Emerson as a Poet, Cabot contends,

The balance is more than preserved by his steeping his own original
quatrain in a little tincture of the wine and spirit of Oriental thought.66

In Fragments found in Poems of the Centenary Edition, he translated four

lines of a Hafiz sonnet entitled Friendship and tried to imitate or keep the Per-
sian style in its translation.67 Late in 1849, while he was discussing the concept
of intellect, he declared:

What is the effect of thought? Hafiz very properly inquires,—

Why changes not the inner mind
Violet earth into musk?

After this discussion, Emerson concludes that the reason for the aversion
from metaphysics is the voice of Nature.68
Early in 1850 the concept of solitude and the idea of serenity in
Khawjah Kermani’s poems, a contemporary of Hafiz so impressed Emerson
that he composed a fine poem entitled From the Persian Kermani, or The Exile.
Perhaps the poem had been written before the one which was called From
Hafiz and it carries the same idea. In October 1850, in Superlative, Emerson
stated that the reader of Hafiz would infer that all food is either candy or
wormwood.69
In 1851, Emerson’s interest in Persian poetry grew so much that he became
quite familiar not only with the thought of the prominent Persian mystic poets,
but also with the views of those who were not considered first-class in this school
of thought. He translated only two quatrains from Omar Khayyam entitled,
From Omar Khayyam; one quatrain appeared in his essay Persian Poetry70 and the
other in Translation.71 Emerson, like most Orientalists, was somewhat fascinated
with Khayyam’s philosophy. In fact he anticipated that he would have an appeal
to the public but, at the same time, he was critically attracted to Khayyam’s
fatalistic view and his idea of ignoring the function and the spirit of hope and
perspectivity. Khayyam declares his retrospective view in his Ruba‘iyyat (Robaiyat-
quatrains) thus,

Ah, my Beloved, fill the Cup that clears

Today of past Regret and Future Fears
Tomorrow—why, tomorrow I may be
Myself with yesterday’s sev’n thousand years.72
 Emerson’s Interest in Persian Mysticism 67

The following quatrain of Khayyam will delineate his fatalistic concept which
is quite contradictory to his view of hope, eternity, emancipation, and ecstasy:

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,

Before we to the dust descend;
Dust into dust, and under dust to lie
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and—sans End!73

Late in 1851, he translated two lines from Ali Ben Abu Taleb (‘Ali Ibn
Abu Talib),74 the fourth Caliph of Islam, concerning friendship; four lines from
Ibn Yamin, a well-known Arabian mystic poet; a quatrain from Hilali, which he
entitled The Flute; two lines from Enweri, (Anvari) the famous Persian lyric writer,
which he titled To Shah Anvari; Ilqo, laureate of the Saljuq emperor Sanjar, reck-
oned among the greatest composers of odes; about twenty lines from Kermani,
entitled The Exile; twenty lines from Hafiz termed From Hafiz; and, lastly, about
thirty-four lines from Seyd, which he called Song of Seyd Nimetollah of Kuhistan,
whose proper name is Seyyd Ni‘matullah Vali and his pseudonym, Vali, meaning
the Master. The mystics sing his poems while they perform their astronomical
dances, during which they repeat their Master’s recital and, at the same time,
imitate the movements of the heavenly bodies. This last poem was authentically
translated by Emerson and first appeared in The Liberty Bell in 1851,75 wherein
he explained the process of this astronomical mystic dance in the introduction.76
From 1852 to 1858, he read more of Sa‘di’s Gulistan and appreciated his
extreme tendency toward freedom, his love for the emancipation of Soul, his
eternal joy, and his Divine ecstasy.
In March of 1852, he showed a great deal of interest in Eastern philoso-
phy. He composed Days and wrote in the Journals that he did not remember
the composition or the correction of Days.77 Furthermore, he confessed that he
would not be able to write such a work again. Days becomes a kind of poetic
parable of the tragic mortality of man and it appeals particularly to those who see
life in terms of human tragedy rather than of divine comedy.78 Strauch, speaking
to Carpenter’s question of the source of the fifth line of Days, “To each they
offer gifts after his will,” proposes the following lines of Hafiz:

Surely I have no treasure,

Yet am I richly satisfied;
God has given that to the Shah
And this to the beggar.79

There is undoubtedly a flavor of Persian mystical thought in Days. It is

perhaps the result of his close contact with the concept of fate and faith in
Oriental mysticism that drew his attention to this idea.
68 Mansur Ekhtiyar

Before he wrote Persian Poetry (1858), he had translated several stanzas from
Hafiz and entered many quotations in his Letters and in the Journals. In an entry
in the Journal for 1855, he stated that the chief fact in the history of the world
is the penury with which the stream of thought runs. Then he reproduced this
concept from Hafiz in the following lines:

O follow, O see the sonnet’s flight!

Thou seest a fleet career,
O child, begot in a night,
That travels a thousand year.80

During the period of the 1850s his interest in Persian poetry grew con-
siderably. On September 26, 1855, he wrote to James Eliot Cabot: “The Eastern
poetry I looked through, but find the Persian still the best by far, and shall stay
by Von Hammer with all the more content.”81 Later on, in his letter to Cabot
and to William Emerson, he made similar statements and, furthermore, added
that he took a great interest in the Gulistan of Sa‘di in which he found a high
degree of exaltation.82
In 1858 he wrote his essay Persian Poetry, which first appeared in the Atlantic
Monthly for January, 1859. For many years he had been interested in finding a
solution to the problem of evil, a quest that led him eventually to search for
its solution in the Oriental concept of unity, which is above all the dualism of
good and evil. Persian Poetry is, to a certain extent, an answer to his problem.
It is, in fact, a scholarly combination of his ideas about Hafiz, Sa‘di, Firdawsi,
Nizami, and Farid al-Din Attar.
In his lecture The Fugitive Slave Law, he referred to Sa‘di’s affectionate
feeling for mankind. He paraphrased two verses of Sa‘di into one sentence thus:
“Beware of hurting the orphan; when the orphan sets a-crying, the throne of
the Almighty is rocked from side to side.”83
For a long time he had considered collecting his notes and publishing a
book—a first book in his life—on Persian Poetry, but he was unable to bring his
desire to fulfillment. Late in his life, this idea so developed that in April, 1874, he
wrote to Octavius Brook Frothingham thus, “One of the papers I have thought
of putting into the new book is Persian Poetry, printed in the Old ‘Atlantic’ and
the very design will show you how niggardly the Muse is.”84 In April 1858, in
a letter to Edwin Percy Whipple, he mentioned his interest in Persian Poetry and
how his essay on this theme was proceeding.85
In an entry in the Journal for 1858, making a distinction between Eastern
and Western poets, Emerson declares that the finest genius in England or France
would feel the absurdity of making fables for his queen or emperor about their
saddles, though Hafiz and Enweri (Anvari) did not.86 He was actually impressed
by the fact that Hafiz, Rumi, and Shams considered a simple Sufi intoxicated
 Emerson’s Interest in Persian Mysticism 69

by the Divine Wine to be closer to the Eternal than an emperor who is bound
to his arrogance and is absorbed in his earthly wishes.
During the period of 1858 to 1864 he studied mysticism of the East.
He checked out several editions of the Gulistan from the Boston Athenaeum
Library87 and asked other libraries to secure them for his use. Late in 1863 he
consulted Malcolm’s History of Persians, volumes I and II, as well as the different
translations of the Gulistan; he referred to a few of them in his entries in the
Journals and in the Letters.
In October 1863, he made reference to Sa‘di’s idea of joy and friendship.
He paraphrased the following passage from the Hammer-Purgstall translation of
Sa‘di’s Gulistan:

No Soul has he who no friend has;

Little joy has he who no garden has.
Who with a moon-face can refresh his heart
Enjoys a luck which has no bounds.
A dungeon is that house which solitude fills,
If they have not, like Saadi, a rose bed.88

He defines the genius of Sa‘di and points out that the human race is inter-
ested in Sa‘di, whilst the cynical tone of Byron, which helps nobody, owes its
lingering longevity only to his genuine talent for melodious expression. Then he
concludes: “Saadi is the poet of friendship, serenity, and of the divine Providence.”89
In February 1864, he reflected his extensive studies of Sa‘di’s thought in
a preface which he wrote for the first edition of the Gulistan, translated from
the original by Francis Gladwin in 1865. He recorded that Sa‘di, though he has
not the lyric flights of Hafiz, has wit, practical sense, and just moral sentiment.
He has, like Franklin, the instinct to teach. He is the poet of friendship, love,
self-devotion, and serenity. Sa‘di, Emerson adds, has been by turns a student, a
water-carrier (saqqa), a traveler, a soldier, a prisoner employed to dig trenches
before Tripoli, and lastly, an honored poet. Through his experiences and his
Persian tongue, he speaks to all nations, and like Homer, Shakespeare, and Mon-
taigne is perpetually modern. Emerson appreciates the sense of joy in Persian
poetry but criticizes any kinds of fatalism. From such attitudes Hafiz perfectly
freed himself, though Sa‘di is slightly subject. Khayyam, however, is considerably
tainted by fate, and a few Persian poets are still imprisoned in his limitations.
From 1864 to the last day of his life, he had a close contact with the
Hindu philosophy, Neoplatonism, Oriental mysticism, and Persian poetry. Par-
ticularly late in Emerson’s life, Hafiz remained, in his opinion, the favorite poet
of Persia; he praises his “Cheerfulness” again in the last entries in the Journals, in
his last letters, and in his essays published after 1870, such as Society and Solitude,
Letters and Social Aims, and Lectures and Biographical Sketches.
70 Mansur Ekhtiyar

In the last Journals he represents Hafiz’s hypothesis for liberty and the
emancipation of the soul from its earthly limitation while discussing Hegel’s
definition of liberty. Hafiz plays with magnitudes, but without ulterior aim; he
fears nothing, he sees far and he sees throughout. There are several references
to Persian thought in the last Journals (1875), in which Hafiz’s view about fate
seems to him most logical and most fascinating. In the last pages of the Journals
and Letters Emerson noted Hafiz’s theory of fate thus:

It stands written on the Gate of Heaven

Woe to him who suffers himself to be betrayed by Fate.90

Further on, Emerson affixes a like note to this idea of Hafiz, saying, “For
he who loves is not betrayed, but makes an ass of Fate.”91
Since in the last six years of his life he did not add entries to the Journals
and wrote nothing (for he could hardly answer a letter), the above cited state-
ments from Hafiz’s Divan (an entry in the Journals for 1873) may be considered
as his last item of contemplation. Very late in his life, perhaps in his last letter,
on one or two occasions, he referred to the Persians and their talents in mysti-
cal thought.

Notes

 1. This section has been adapted from The Chronological Development of Emerson’s
Interest in Persian Mysticism, by Mansur Ekhtiyar (Tehran: Tehran UP, 1976).
 2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 1820–1876. (1820), 21–22.
 3. Ibid., 69.
 4. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Works, IV, 52–53.
  5. Kenneth W. Cameron, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Reading (New York: Haskell House,
1941), 22–23.
 6. Emerson, Journals, I (1820), 69.
 7. Ibid., 157.
 8. Emerson, Letters, I (1822), 114.
 9. Ibid., 114–115.
10. Kenneth W. Cameron, The Transcendentalists and Minerva (Hartford, CT: Tran-
scendental Books, 1958), II, 435–437.
11. Arthur Christy, The Orient in American Transcendentalism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1932), 63.
12. Emerson, Journals, I (1824), 380.
13. Emerson, Journals, I (1824), 380.
14. Emerson, Joel Porte (Emerson in his Journals. Harvard University Press, 1982), 41.
15. Ibid., II (1830), 329.
16. Ibid., 329–344.
17. Ibid., 473.
18. Academie des Inscriptions, Vol. 37, 23.
 Emerson’s Interest in Persian Mysticism 71

19. Menu (or Manu), Institute of Hindu Law; or the Ordinance of Menu according to
the Glossary of Culluca, translated from Sanskrit with the preface by Sir William Jones
(Calcutta, 1796).
20. In “Nature” (1836), Emerson mentions Vayasa incorrectly as a philosopher.
21. Frederic Ives Carpenter, Emerson and Asia (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1930), 12.
22. Ibid., 105.
23. “Do not flatter your benefactors. The bread that you give me is not thine to
give, but mine when the great order of nature has seated me today at your table. Do
not let me deceive you by thanks with the notion that you are aught but the moderator
of the comparing for the hour, though you call yourself rich man and great benefactor,
perhaps.” Emerson, Journals, V, 408.
24. Samuel Miller. The Brief Retrospect of Eighteenth Century (New York: T and
J Swords, 1803), I, 72.
25. Emerson, Letters, II (1840), 294.
26. Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Mohammed Schemsed-din Hafis. Der Diwan, 2 vols.
(Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1812–13).
27. Shams of Tabriz, guyand ishq chist bagu tarka ikhtiyar. har ko ze ikhtiyar narast
ikhtiyar nist., trans. Reynold A. Nicholson in Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi (Cambridge: Rout-
ledge, 1952), 50–51.
28. Emerson, Works, II, 137–139.
29. Carpenter, Emerson and Asia, 162.
30. Emerson, Journals, V (1840), 570.
31. Emerson, Works, IX, 130.
32. Emerson, Journals, VI (1843), 463.
33. Khizr is often identified with Enoch in Islamic mystical literature.
34. C. F. Strauch, “Emerson’s Sacred Science,” PMLA 73 (June 1958), 242.
35. Emerson, Journals, VI (1843), 463.
36. Ibid., 375.
37. Carpenter, Emerson and Asia, 170.
38. Emerson, Journals, VI (1844), 493–494.
39. Emerson, Works, IV, 39.
40. Arthur J. Arberry, Persian Poems (London: Everyman’s Library, 1954), 127.
41. Emerson, Works, IV, 50.
42. Emerson adds the rest of his statement in “Society and Solitude,” Works, VII,
219, 22; See Journals, VII (1845), 241–242.
43. Emerson, Letters, III (1846), 341.
44. Emerson, Journals, VII (1846), 170.
45. J. I. Harrison, The Teachers of Emerson (New York: Sturgis & Walton Co., 1910),
275.
46. Proclus, On the Theology of Plato (London: Law, 1816), I, 216.
47. Emerson, Works, III, 44.
48. Ibid., VIII, 70.
49. Ibid., 246.
50. Edward G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia (Cambridge, UK: Routledge,
1928), III, 278.
51. “The Poems of Emerson,” The Coming Age, XXNII (1940), 504.
72 Mansur Ekhtiyar

52. Emerson, Works, IX, 126. See, also, Carpenter, Emerson and Asia, 189.
53. Edward Waldo Emerson, Emerson in Concord (Cambridge, MA: The Riverside
Press, 1889), 231.
54. W. R. Alger, The Poetry of the East (Boston: Kissinger Publishing, 1856), 166.
55. One who serves wine.
56. J. D. Yohannan, “The Influence of Persian Poetry upon Emerson’s Work,” Ameri-
can Literature, 20. (March 1943), 260.
57. American Literature, XV (March 1943), 26–41.
58. Emerson, Journals, IV, 465.
59. Literally translated as “A Treatise by Saqi.”
60. Ibid., 529. A copy of it is still in Emerson’s Library at the Antiquarian House.
61. Emerson, Journals, VII (1847), 269.
62. Ibid., 328.
63. Emerson, Works, VIII, 263.
64. Emerson, Journals, VII (1847), 281.
65. Emerson, Works, IX, 299–300, 303.
66. Joel Benton. Emerson as a Poet (New York: M. F. Mansfield & A. Wessels,
1833), 29.
67. Emerson, Works, IX, 363.
68. Journals (1849), VIII, 19.
69. Ibid., 129–130.
70. Emerson, Works, VIII, 244.
71. Emerson, Works, IX, 301.
72. Edward Fitzgerald, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and the Soloman and Absal of
Jami (London, n.d.), 73.
73. Ibid., 74.
74. Emerson, Works, IX, 302.
75. The Liberty Bell (Boston, 1851), 78–81.
76. Emerson, Works, IX, 304.
77. Emerson, Journals, VIII (1852), 421.
78. E. S. Oliver, “Emerson’s ‘Days,’ ” New England Quarterly 19 (December 1946):
520. See, also, Carpenter, Emerson Handbook (New York: Hendricks House, 1953), 188–189.
79. Carl F. Strauch, “Mss. Relationship of Emerson’s ‘Days,’ ” Philological Quarterly
NXVIII (April, 1950): 199. See, also, Carpenter, Emerson and Asia, 186–188. He asserts
that the following statement in the Journals for May 24, 1847 has a clear allusion to the
lines cited from Hafiz: “The days come and go . . . but they say nothing, and if we do
not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.” On the eve of his forty-
fourth birthday, Emerson wrote this sentence later embodied in his poem “Days.” See
Journals, VII, 277.
80. Perhaps a better and more accurate translation of the last two lines would be:
“A child that is one night old takes a trip a hundred years long.” See Journals, VIII
(1858), 542.
81. Emerson, Letters, IV (1855), 530–531.
82. Emerson, Letters, V (1857), 92.
83. Emerson, Works, XI, 238.
 Emerson’s Interest in Persian Mysticism 73

84. Emerson, Letters, VI (1874), 260.

85. Ibid., V (1858), 104.
86. Emerson, Journals, IX (1858), 145–46.
87. Cameron, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Reading, 33, 34.
88. Emerson, Journals, IX (1863), 545.
89. Ibid., 562.
90. Emerson, Journals, X (1873), 473.
91. Emerson, Journals, X, 55.
 3

Ralph Waldo Emerson

and the Muslim Orient

Marwan M. Obeidat 1

Life in the East is fierce, short, hazardous, and in extremes. Its elements are
few and simple, not exhibiting the long range and undulation of European
existence, but rapidly reaching the best and the worst.
—Emerson, Persian Poetry

The involvement of Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott in Oriental thought is essen-

tially part of the beginnings of comparative religion as a field for further study,
but it goes beyond that. In Emerson’s case it influences his writing—particularly
his interest in and admiration for the Sufi poets, and especially Hafiz and Sa‘di.
In 1822, a year after his graduation from college, writing to his mentor and
favorite aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, who informed him of Oriental books she
had recently come upon, Emerson remarks:

I am curious to read your Hindu mythologies. One is apt to lament

over indolence and ignorance, when he reads some of those sanguine
students of the Eastern antiquities, who seem to think that all the
books of knowledge, and all the wisdom of Europe twice-told, lie hid
in the treasures of the Bramins and the volumes of Zoroaster. When
I lie dreaming on the possible contents of pages, as dark to me as
the characters on the Seal of Solomon, I console myself with calling
it learning’s El Dorado. Every man has a fairy land just beyond the
compass of his horizon . . . and it is very natural that literature at
large should look for some fanciful stores of mind which surpassed
example and possibility.2

75
76 Marwan M. Obeidat

It seems probable that Emerson had already known something of the Orientals
before he wrote this letter to his aunt, as Frederic I. Carpenter suggests,3 but as
yet he is not fully aware of them. The course of correspondence between Mary
Moody Emerson and her nephew marked not only the presence of the Orient
at the dawning of Emerson’s intellectual development, but also his admiration for
it. In turn, Aunt Mary’s enthusiasm led to and encouraged the youth’s life-long
habit of speaking of the Orient. A few months earlier Emerson had written:

I was the pampered child of the East. I was born where the soft
western gale breathed upon me fragrance of cinnamon groves and
through the seventy windows of my hall the eye fell on the Arabian
harvest. A hundred elephants, appareled in cloth of gold, carried my
train to war, and the smile of the Great King beamed upon Omar.
But now—the broad Indian moon looks through the broken arches
of my tower, and the wind of desolation fans me with poisonous
airs; the spider’s threads are in the tapestry which adorns my walls
and the rain of night is heard in my halls for the music of the
daughters of Cashmere.4

At this stage Emerson’s Orientalism, Arthur Christy suggests, was not yet
“disciplined by many books.”5 Though undisciplined it may be, the early phase
of Emerson’s Orientalism shows an awareness of the outlandish and the inacces-
sible—the other half of the world—an awareness of its attractiveness, romance,
poetry, and religion. Such an awareness of the Orient constitutes only fragments
of fantasy that reflect Emerson’s preoccupation with exoticism. “The Arabian
harvest” is at variance with Indian Cashmere, and is of course a different taste;
and Omar, whether the second Muslim Caliph or not, is difficult to associate
with the beams of the Indian moon. But Emerson did not linger much on these
matters. What concerned him is the romantic suggestiveness of the “cinnamon
groves,” “the broken arches,” “the cloth of gold,” and “the broad Indian moon”
as a source of literary enchantment with the Orient. These early quotations
show little knowledge on Emerson’s part of Oriental literatures and religions. As
Frederic Carpenter perceptively suggests, Emerson’s immature interest in the Ori-
ent varied between “fascination and aversion.”6 However, the feeling of aversion
predominated in his early writing. For thirteen years, from the age of twenty-
one to thirty-four (the period from 1824 to 1837), Emerson did not record
any significant ideas or concern with the Orient, either Islamic or non-Islamic.
Perhaps this lack of interest was due to the difficulty in obtaining sufficient
information. Later in his career Emerson exploited the attractive mystery of the
Orient and appropriated much of its culture to his own uses. But he was not
an Orientalist himself, though he gradually began to rediscover Oriental material
and to read all the Islamic books he came upon.7
 Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Muslim Orient 77

There is no certain proof, observes Arthur Christy, as to when Emerson

practically came under the influence of Oriental thought.8 But it is evident that
Greek Platonism was the chief element in formulating his Orientalism, which
was a relatively late development in his career. “The kernel of Emerson’s Ori-
entalism,”9 to use Carpenter’s words, lies in his series of Occidental biographi-
cal lectures, Representative Men (1850). Though it did not offer much space for
specific Islamic material, the book contained references to it, especially in the
essay Plato. The first sentence in the essay reads: “Among secular books, Plato
only is entitled to Omar’s fanatical compliment to the Koran, when he said,
‘Burn the libraries; for their value is in this book.’ ”10 The application of Omar’s
statement to the Qur’an (alleged to be said at the conquest of Alexandria) to
Plato’s work brings East to West whereby certain boundaries and categories are
set up, associations and distinctions made. The Orient is given a space where it
stands vis-à-vis the Occident. While in Egypt, “Plato . . . imbibed the idea of
one Deity,” writes Emerson, “in which all things are absorbed,” and thus,

The unity of Asia, and the detail of Europe; the infinitude of the
Asiatic soul and the defining, result-loving, machine-making, surface-
seeking, opera-going Europe,—Plato came to join, and, by contact,
to enhance the energy of each. The excellence of Europe and Asia
are in his brain. Metaphysics and natural philosophy expressed the
genius of Europe; he substructs the religion of Asia, as the base.11

While Asia is associated with the soul and “religion,” Europe is associated with
the mind and “metaphysics and natural philosophy.” This distinction suppresses
Asiatic religions to a substructural level. But their presence as “the base” of
European culture is, though reductionist, of significance. Plato’s arrival in ancient
Egypt is an arrival of defining, and “[t]his defining is philosophy.”12 “At last,
comes Plato,” writes Emerson, “the distributor who needs no barbaric paint,
or tattoo, or whooping; for he can define. He leaves with Asia the vast and
superlative; he is the arrival of accuracy and intelligence.”13 From the very outset
Emerson initiates his analysis by what he considers as “the one, and the two,”
or Unity and Variety.14 The split had appeared and reappeared in many forms:
as the one and the many, being versus intellect, rest versus motion, and finally
East versus West. The key passage follows: “The country of unity, of immovable
institutions . . . of men faithful in doctrine and in practice to the idea of a deaf,
unimplorable, immense fate, is Asia. . . . On the other side, the genius of Europe
is active and creative.” East and West are intellectually defined here. The differ-
ence between them is neither geographical, nor racial. It is a difference in the
cultures that distinguishes the two worlds. In any case, Emerson’s pro-Western
stance is too evident to be missed: he speaks of “immovable institutions” and
of a “deaf, unimplorable fate” in characterizing the Orient, but emphasizes the
78 Marwan M. Obeidat

“active” and “creative” in characterizing the Western mind, which clearly stands
higher. And finally Europe is “a land of arts, inventions, trade, freedom. If the
East loved infinity, the West delighted in boundaries.”15 Certainly it is not out
of dislike that Emerson subordinates the Orient to the Occident; but it is spe-
cifically out of his belief in a consequential movement of history, a movement
which would establish the Occident as superior and the Orient as inferior. In
the “Divinity School Address” Emerson writes,

I look for the hour when that supreme Beauty which ravished the
souls of those Eastern men, and chiefly of those Hebrews, and through
their lips spoke oracles to all time, shall speak in the West also. The
Hebrew and Greek Scriptures contain immortal sentences, that have
been bread of life to millions. But they have no epical integrity; are
fragmentary; are not shown in their order to the intellect. I look
for the new Teacher that shall follow so far those shining laws that
he shall see them come full circle.16

In Plato Emerson saw a “new Teacher,” a teacher who prefigures America’s

“strong man” who, in turn, “has entered the race.”17 Thus, Emerson attempts to
identify himself with Plato, and his identification with the Greek philosopher
implicates him in the westward movement of civilization; it suggests America’s
preeminence in world history, a preeminence which is part of a sequential
movement that involves a transition from the Oriental to the Occidental and
from Europe to America.
Emerson’s assessment of world civilization is not motivated by any kind
of bias against the Orient. On the contrary, there is strong evidence to believe
that he has a unique admiration for it. The essay Persian Poetry, for instance, his
fascination with the Sufi poets, his imitation of Hafiz and Sa‘di, his numerous
quotations from the Qur’an and other Islamic literature, his efforts to appropriate
Indian and Brahmin mythology, all suggest a uniquely sympathetic attitude.18 In
the essay Plato Emerson points out that the Orient had something the Greek
“Teacher” could not possess, something that kept him from influencing the
multitude: “It is almost the sole deduction from the merit of Plato, that his
writings have not,—what is no doubt incident to this regnancy of intellect in
his work,—the vital authority which the screams of prophets and the sermons
of unlettered Arabs and Jews possess.”19 Emerson was deeply attracted to the
Oriental mind, to its “vital authority,” unity, spirituality, and mysticism. All were
among the several things that drew him toward the Orient—not as a place, but
certainly as a cultural idea. But Emerson’s Western preference is more overt,
though he grants the Orientals (Arabs, Persians, Indians) a fair position on
the scale of civilization: “If it comes back to the question of final superiority,”
Emerson writes, “it is too plain that there is no question that the star of empire
 Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Muslim Orient 79

rolls West.”20 Emerson’s concern here is with the superiority of an Occidental

West as opposed to the inferiority of an Oriental East. Being Occidental is
being better: “Orientalism is Fatalism, resignation: Occidentalism is Freedom and
Will. We Occidentals are educated to wish to be first.”21 Suffice it to say that
Emerson read and admired the Orientals without abandoning an awareness of
his ascendancy and superiority. His final verdict is “we read the Orientals, but
remain Occidental.”22
In the lecture Natural Religion, which he read to a group of religious
liberals known as “Radicals” at their meeting held in Boston in 1869, Emerson,
while discussing the doctrines of the existence of Christ, is reported in the
newspapers as having said that

We measure all religions by their civilizing power. We account

Mohammedanism, Mormonism, Thugism, Agapism, and other sects,
old or new, which gratify the passions, as mischievous and therefore
false. Christianity, on the other hand, throve against the physical
interests and passions of men, and needs no other stamp of truth.23

That the Muslim Orient is characterized by a religion which gratifies “the physi-
cal interests and passions of men” Emerson accepts, at this point, by ignoring
the spiritual foundation of the religion, but in the same lecture he points out,
somewhat apologetically, that although the “character of Mohammed is, on the
page of history, very bad,” there is “a certain spiritual elevation in [the Prophet’s
character], which appeared in his followers. And certainly in the Koran, whether
they have borrowed the Christian Scriptures or not, there is abundance of noble
sentences.”24 Even with this assumption of borrowing from the Christian scrip-
tures, Emerson recognized in the Qur’an an “abundance of noble sentences”
which certainly struck his mind to the furthest extremes. Emerson’s interest in
the Muslim Orient, however, reveals that he was more prepared to be involved
in certain manifestations of the outer form of the religion—as is indicated in
specific sayings and utterances—than in its philosophical, theoretical dogmas.
Thus Emerson imbued his writing with Islamic quotations, or brief, incidentally
confused, references to Islamic metaphysics and made these subservient to his
views.
In the essay Fate, which appeared in The Conduct of Life (1860), Emerson
displays his understanding of the concept at hand.

Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but
perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face
it. The Spartan, embodying his religion in his country, dies before
its majesty without a question. The Turk, who believes his doom is
written on the iron lead in the moment when he entered the world,
80 Marwan M. Obeidat

rushes on the enemy’s saber with undivided will. The Turk, the Arab,
the Persian, accepts the foreordained fate:—

“On two days, it steads not to run from they grave,

  The appointed, and unappointed day;
On the first, neither balm nor physician can save,
  Nor thee, on the second, the Universe slay.”25

Emerson comes to the conclusion that the doctrine of fatalism may be turned
to a beneficent force, if it is properly understood. But is can also be a social evil
if accepted passively or resignedly. Emerson’s understanding of the concept is
enhanced by the succeeding essay, Power. The essay develops the idea of freedom
over against surrender to fate, which, to Emerson, is a characteristic of Islamic
Orientalism: “Orientalism is Fatalism, resignation.” A complete resignation to fate
Emerson dismisses as distasteful. In the preface that Emerson wrote for Sa‘di’s
Gulistan, in 1865, he describes the Persian poets as fatalists: “In common with
his countrymen, Saadi gives prominence to fatalism, a doctrine which, in Persia,
in Arabia, and in India, has had in all ages a dreadful charm. ‘To all men,’ says
the Koran, ‘is their day of death appointed, and they cannot postpone or advance
it one hour.’ ”26 Emerson illustrates his point with a quotation from the Qur’an
which in turn expresses its own fatalist nature. Emerson’s argument here consti-
tutes his own understanding of an Oriental system of determinism, a determinism
which distinguishes two predestinate points in every man’s life: the day of his
birth and that of his death. In the essay Persian Poetry, Emerson characterizes the
Persians, stressing their fatalism: “Religion and poetry are all their civilization.
The religion teaches an inexorable destiny. It distinguishes only two days in each
man’s history,—his birthday, called the Day of the Lot, and the Day of Judgment.
Courage and absolute submission to what is appointed for him are his virtues.”27
But Emerson found much more in the Persian poets than fatalism. The Sufi
poets influenced Emerson more profoundly than any other group of Oriental
writers. The affinity between Emerson’s thought and the Persian poets is tangible.
But his remarks on them and their poetry remain rather general. Even though
he developed an ideal concept of Hafiz and Sa‘di, Emerson did not seem to
have attempted to characterize them as poets, to see in what way, or ways, they
were similar, and how they differed. Yet he admired their poetry and accepted it
as ideal, and he viewed them as poets of intellectual liberty. While they believed
in a designated fate, the Persian poets enjoyed an “intellectual freedom” that was
part of a joyful attitude toward life.28 In Fate, Emerson admires the “sallies of
freedom,” “One example of which is the verse of the Persian Hafiz, ’Tis writ-
ten on the gate of Heaven, ‘Woe to him who suffers himself to be betrayed by
Fate!’ ”29 And again:
 Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Muslim Orient 81

We learn that the soul of Fate is the soul of us, as Hafiz sings,
“Alas! till now I had not known,
My guide and fortune’s guide are one.”30

In the essay Persian Poetry, in reference to Hafiz’s “heroic sentiment and contempt
for the world,” Emerson writes:

And sometimes his . . . world [is] only one pebble more in the

eternal vortex and revolution of Fate:—
“I am what I am
My dust will be again.”31

In the essay Power, while he discusses the forms of power and the ideas of free-
dom, Emerson speaks of “this affirmative force . . . ‘On the neck of the young
man,’ said Hafiz, ‘sparkles no gem so gracious as enterprise.’ ”32 And at the end
of The Conduct of Life, in the essay Illusions, Emerson writes, pointing out the
charm of illusions and the necessity of recognizing them,

It would be hard to put more mental and moral philosophy than

the Persians have thrown into a sentence,
“Fooled thou must be, thou wisest of the wise:
Then be the fool of virtue, not of vice.”33

Undoubtedly Emerson liked this quality of freedom and mental force which the
Persian poets had. Speaking of the relative recklessness toward life which they
expressed in their poetry, Emerson quotes Hafiz:

I batter the wheel of heaven

  When it rolls not rightly by
I am not one of the snivelers
  Who fall thereon and die.34

Again:

Loose the knots of the heart; never think on thy fate:

No Euclid has yet disentangled that snarl.35

It is this bold but joyful attitude toward life that Emerson admires most; for, like
Hafiz, he believed that the force of men’s thoughts lies in the way of uttering
them. “Loose the knots of the heart” is in effect a statement that shows the
willingness to die when the appointed time comes.
82 Marwan M. Obeidat

This quality of recklessness is also a quality of rejoicing and intellectual

vastness. As Emerson tells us, “Hafiz praises wine, maidens, boys, birds, mornings,
and music, to give vent to his immense hilarity and sympathy with every form
of beauty and joy. . . . Those are the natural topics and language of his wit and
perception. But it is the play of the wit and joy of song that he loves.”36 Emerson
goes on to say, comparing Hafiz and Shakespeare, “A saint might lend an ear to
the riotous fun of Falstaff; for it is not created to excite the animal appetites,
but to vent the joy of the supernal intelligence.”37 So, in the overall analysis,
the merit of expressing “the joy of supernal intelligence” becomes a “certificate
of profound thought” and “intellectual liberty.”38 If Hafiz vented supreme joy,
Sa‘di was “the joy-giver and the enjoyer.”39 In the essay on Shakespeare; or the
Poet, Emerson remarks:

One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his
cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet,—for beauty is
his aim . . . Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the
universe. . . . Homer lies in the sun-shine; Chaucer is glad and erect,
and Saadi says, “It was rumored abroad that I was penitent, but what
have I to do with repentance?”40

While he refers to Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, and Chaucer, Emerson simultane-

ously mentions Sa‘di and brings them all together. If Hafiz and Shakespeare are
poets of “joy” and “emancipation,” Sa‘di was the poet of “cheerful temper,” a
poet in whose poetry “suns rise and set.”41 In the poem “Saadi,” Sa‘di emerges
as “The cheerer of men’s hearts.”42 The “wisdom of God is he.”43 And in the
Preface to Gulistan Emerson writes:

[Sa‘di] exhibits perpetual variety of situation and incident, and an

equal depth of experience with Cardinal de Retz in Paris, or Doc-
tor Johnson in London. He finds room on his narrow canvas for
the extremes of the lot, the play of motives, the rule of destiny, the
lessons of morals, and the portraits of great men.

Emerson adds, “though he has not the lyric flights of Hafiz, [Sa‘di] has wit,
practical sense, and just moral sentiments. He has the instinct to teach, and from
every occurrence must draw the moral. . . . He is the poet of friendship, love,
self-devotion, and serenity.”44 In other words, to Emerson, Sa‘di is a man of real
genius, or morality, of “practical sense,” and “just moral sentiments.” He is both
a teacher and a poet, an enjoyer and a joy-giver. In brief, Sa‘di is not only a
poet of “friendship” and “self-devotion,” but he is also a teacher of “the lessons
of morals,” an example of “great men.”
Emerson saw yet another feature in the Persian Sa‘di: self-reliance. Near
the opening of the poem “Saadi,” Emerson suggests that Sa‘di had such a quality.
 Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Muslim Orient 83

Yet Saadi loved the race of men,—

No churl, immured in cave or den;
. . . 
But he has no companion;
Come ten, or come a million,
Good Saadi dwells alone.45

This virtue takes on other forms in Sa‘di’s writing as well as in that of Hafiz.
It becomes an expression of self-assurance, independence, and authority. In the
like manner Emerson writes of Hafiz:

That hardihood and self-equality of every sound nature, which result

from the feeling that the spirit in him is entire and as good as the
world, which entitle the poet to speak with authority, and make
him an object of interest . . . are in Hafiz, and abundantly fortify
and ennoble his tone.46

This feeling of self-assurance helped the Persian poets accomplish self-reliance

and justify it to the common man by means of self-expression. Since, in a
Sufi sense, the whole nature evidences divinity, absolute beauty is reflected in
all natural objects and thus in every self-reliant man who could use nature as
his language. Emerson wrote of Sa‘di: “He has also that splendor of expression
which alone, without wealth of thought, sometimes constitutes a poet, and forces
us to ponder the problem of style.”47 In an entry in the Journals this quality of
self-expression is more clear. “Expression,” writes Emerson, influenced by the
reading of Hafiz,

is all we want: not knowledge, but vent: we know enough; but have not
leaves and lungs enough for a healthy perspiration and growth. Hafiz
has: Hafiz’s good things, like those of all good poets, are the cheap
blessings of water, air, and fire [the elements of Nature] . . . “Keep
the body open,” is the hygeian precept . . . Large utterance!48

Emerson believed that for the ideal poet (Sufi poets were generally ideal to
Emerson) the splendid expression is Nature. And Nature is language, a language
that the good poets alone can make and communicate to their fellow men.
To use Frederic I. Carpenter’s judicious judgment, “to Hafiz and Saadi as
ideal poets Emerson ascribed freedom of thought and freedom of spirit, which
resulted in their feeling of absolute joy in the world; how they showed him a
sincerity and self-reliance, which assured them of the basic value of life; and
finally how they possessed for him a perception of beauty in Nature and in Man,
which inspired their poetic expression.”49 Obviously Emerson admired and spoke
highly of both Hafiz and Sa‘di not because they had “partially freed themselves
84 Marwan M. Obeidat

from Mohammedanism,” as Carpenter explains,50 but because they were poets

of intellectual liberty, of “hilarity,” of “serenity,” in their own Sufi way. Although
he still identified them as fatalists, Emerson, I believe, admired the Persian poets
because of the quality of mental vastness they enjoyed; the variety of subjects
they treated, and, more specifically, because they had a “perception of beauty in
nature and in Man.” They praised “wine [wine in a Sufi sense is a symbol of
intoxication with Divinity], maidens, boys, mornings, and music”51 in expressing
their love of beauty. It is the use of wit and the expression of Beauty that gave
Sa‘di and Hafiz the assurance of pleasing the Almighty with their poetry. “Like
Homer and Dante and Chaucer, Saadi [and Hafiz],” asserts Emerson,

possessed a great advantage over the poets of cultivated times in

being the representatives of learning and thought to [their] coun-
trymen. Those old poets felt that all wit was their wit, they used
their memory as readily as their invention, and were are once the
librarian as well as the poet, historiographer as well as the priest of
the Muses.52

The Sufi poets were the inspired men of their people. And they used their
cultivated thought and memory and wit to demonstrate their admiration for
the beautiful and, more importantly, for the divine. In Eloquence Emerson writes:

The Persian poet Saadi tells us that a person with a disagreeable

voice was reading the Koran aloud, when a holy man, passing by,
asked what was his monthly stipend. He answered, “Nothing at all.”
“But why then do you take so much trouble?” He replied, “I read
for the sake of God.” The other rejoined, “for God’s sake, do not
read; for if you read the Koran in this manner you will destroy the
splendor of Islamism.”53

The fact that Sa‘di himself wrote poetry for the sake of God is revealed when
Emerson writes of the “angels descending with salvers of glory in their hands.
On asking one of them for whom those were intended, he answered, ‘For
Shaikh Saadi of Shiraz who has written a stanza of poetry that has met with the
approbation of God Almighty.’ ”54 Though fabulous, such a note shows Emerson’s
appreciation of the quality of eloquence which Sa‘di held. In much the same
manner, Hafiz replied to the pilgrim returning from Mecca: “Boast not rashly,
prince of the pilgrims, of thy fortune. Thou hast indeed seen the temple; but
I, the Lord of the temple. Nor has any man inhaled from the musk-bladder
of the merchant or from the musky morning wind that sweet air which I am
permitted to breathe every hour of the day.”55 Indeed in seeing and simultane-
 Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Muslim Orient 85

ously expressing Beauty, Hafiz appears to have seen the Lord; and likewise Sa‘di
has written a stanza of verse so eloquent that it has pleased God the Almighty.
Suffice it to say that Emerson’s interest in and admiration for the Sufi
poets is so evident that they can hardly go unnoticed. Though as flattering and
sympathetic as Emerson’s stance toward the Islamic Orient is, it is yet imbued
with certain simplifications of Islam and the Prophet. However, these are only
scattered, sometimes confused, remarks. As early as 1841, in an entry in the
journals, arguing to the conclusion that worship of saints and worship in general
are diversions “from the insight of the soul,” Emerson observes:

The various matters which men magnify, as trade, law, creeds, sciences,
paintings, coins, manuscripts, histories, poems, are all pieces of virtue
which serve well enough to unfold the talents of the man, but are
all diversions form the insight of the soul. Saints’ worship is one of
these,—the worship of Mahomet or Jesus,—like all the rest, a fine
field of ingenuity wherein construct theories.56

The quoted passage does not accurately highlight the spirit of Islam. Muhammad,
like all the Muslims, worshipped and believed in Allah, and Emerson’s comparison
between the worship of Jesus in Christianity and the worship of Muhammad in
Islam is untenable since it disregards the fact that the Prophet is not God and
should not be worshipped. In the essay Social Aims, while he discusses the bases
of civil society that include social and individual manners, labor, public action,
conversation, and education, Emerson points out:

True wit never made us laugh. Mahomet seems to have borrowed

by anticipation of several centuries a leaf from the mind of Sweden-
borg, when he wrote in the Koran:—“On the day of resurrection
those who have indulged in ridicule will be called to the door of
Paradise, and have it shut in their faces when they reach it. Again,
on their turning back, they will be called to another door, and
again, on reaching it, will see it closed against them; and so on ad
infinitum, without end.”57

While Emerson errs if he means literally that Muhammad wrote the Qur’an, he
correctly perceives that the Prophet encouraged and urged the Muslims to have
a sound sense of seriousness in many of his utterances and occasional remarks.
The Qur’an, of course, is God’s words that the Prophet, by God’s decree, was to
deliver to the Muslims and non-Muslims alike. In any case, Emerson found the
Prophet’s words congenial. He uses them to illustrate his point that an excess of
humor is incompatible with sincerity and seriousness. Again, while he attributes
86 Marwan M. Obeidat

seriousness to the Prophet, Emerson suggests that “Mahomet seems to have bor-
rowed by anticipation of several centuries a lead to the mind of Swedenborg.”
Such a remark, though it may not be taken literally, seems to imply that the
Occident too had its own moral, religious strictness which Muhammad had
anticipated. At any rate, Emerson’s tendency to take the liberty of incorporating
Islamic quotations and ideas into his own thought shows an interest in their
inspirational and cultural value.
Discussing social laws that include labor, trade, property, and faith, in a lec-
ture on Man the Reformer, Emerson points out that the spread of Islam occurred
because of the impelling power of its beliefs and its fanatical enthusiasm.

Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world

is the triumph of some enthusiasm. The victories of the Arabs after
Mahomet, who, in a few years, from a small and mean beginning,
established a larger empire than that of Rome, is an example. They
did they knew not what. The naked Derar, horsed on an idea, was
found an overmatch for a troop of Roman cavalry. The women
fought like men, and conquered the Roman men. They were miser-
ably equipped, miserably fed. They were temperance troops. There
was neither brandy nor flesh needed to feed them. They conquered
Asia, and Africa, and Spain, on barley.58

Indeed Islam spread in a relatively short period of time, and the Muslims con-
quered Asia, Africa, and Spain. However, the religion had a power of faith, too,
which is what Emerson means by enthusiasm, and once in the battlefield, the
Muslims, though “miserably fed” and “miserably equipped,” believed that the
cause of God—or, as the Qur’an puts it, the sabil Allah59—was well worth the
struggle. To Emerson, Christendom, unlike Islam, had a less fanatic but more
gracious faith, though this he criticizes as dead, moribund except in name. In
the same lecture Emerson says:

But there will dawn ere long on our politics, on our modes of liv-
ing, a nobler morning than that Arabian faith, in the sentiment of
love. This is one remedy for all ills, the panacea of nature. . . . This
great, overgrown, dead Christendom of ours still keeps alive at least
the name of a lover of mankind.60

The implicit contrast between his idea of a new faith, based on a sentiment of
love, and Oriental Islam as well as dead Christianity, reveals Emerson’s distrust
of the civilizing power of Islam or any other formal religion. For in the early
inspiration of Christianity (now formalized and dead) he sees a “nobler morn-
ing than that Arabian faith.” So if Islam suggested to Emerson an impelling
 Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Muslim Orient 87

enthusiasm and religious heroism, Christendom brought to mind “the name of

a lover of mankind.”
In an entry in his journals, which he entitles Mahomet and Woman, Emerson
brings in ideas about the transformation of Islam as a religion into practical,
enthusiastic power, and he associates these ideas with a certain Mr. Vethake of
New York.

Mr. V[ethake]’s opinion was that Mahomet had tried power, and
Jesus, or, I think, John, persuasion; that Mahomet has felt that per-
suasion, this John-persuasion had miserably failed . . . and he said,
I will try this Oriental weapon, the sword, which never, never will
go West; and he said to Ayesha, “I have found out how to work it.
This woman element will not bear the sword; well, I will dispose
of woman: She may exist; but henceforward I will veil it” so he
veiled Woman. Then the sword could work and eat . . . I smelt
fagots . . . Fagots!61

Muhammad used the sword in much the same way as he used persuasion. But
Emerson’s acquaintance, Vethake, perhaps reiterating the centuries-old tradition
of equating Islam with religious tyranny, views Muhammad as a Prophet who
transformed religion into an impelling power by granting full license to the
sword and by suppressing women—the most civilizing element in society. In the
passage, however, we are told that “This woman element [could] not bear the
sword . . . So he [Muhammad] veiled it.” Even though this “veiled” element of
society was neither disposed of, nor dismissed as incapable of “sufficient moral or
intellectual force,”62 it is suggested here that such an element could be suppressed.
On the contrary, in the passage just quoted from Man the Reformer, Emerson
tells us: “The [Muslim] women fought like men, and conquered Roman men.”
The view which Emerson held there is obviously at variance with Vethake’s
in that it shows more admiration than distrust for this sense of enthusiasm he
found in Islam.
By and large, however, Emerson found the Muslim East congenial. His fas-
cination for as well as criticism of the Muslim Orient may perhaps be explained
as stemming from a mixture of condescension and admiration. Emerson read
the Orientals, and used all his reading in his writings, but he still identified his
thought closely with the Western World. He read them in order to get vocabulary
for his ideas (he did not want to get the Oriental ideas for their own sake).63
In other words, Emerson preferred to remain Occidental. And his interest in
Oriental philosophy and religions remains a manifestation of a lightly prejudice-
colored but preeminently sympathetic attitude, a demonstration of the Western
preeminence in world history. What Emerson wanted to do was to transform
the Orient into a framework, or rather a vocabulary, of his own. Admittedly he
88 Marwan M. Obeidat

was successful in incorporating the Oriental material as an exotic element, and,

on occasion, as in the case of the Sufi poets, he showed a profound interest in
and fascination for the Sufi ideals for their own sake.

Notes

 1. This article was first published in The Muslim World, vol. 78, no. 2 (1988),
132–145.
 2. Ralph L. Rusk, ed., The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 6 vols. (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1939), I, 116–17.
  3. Frederic I. Carpenter, Emerson and Asia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1930), 3–4.
  4. William H. Gilman, et al., eds., The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph
Waldo Emerson, 16 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1930), 3–4. Subsequent
references refer to this edition; henceforth cited as JMN.
 5. Arthur Christy, The Orient in American Transcendentalism: A Study of Emerson,
Thoreau, and Alcott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), 68.
 6. Carpenter, Emerson and Asia, 9.
  7. In 1837 Emerson lists the Historia Muslemica of Abulfeda, and, in 1840, Simon
Ockley’s History of the Saracens. In 1841 he read Thomas Carlyle’s book On Heroes and
Hero Worship (which included a lecture on the Prophet). And in 1845 he read Akhlaq-i
Jalali, an interesting book which shows how Greek philosophy was introduced into Islamic
mysticism. And as early as 1822 Emerson read the Arabian Nights, and at the same time
he was reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapters 50 to 52 of which
describe the rise and fall of the Muslim Caliphate.
  8. Arthur Christy, “Emerson’s Debt to the Orient,” The Monist, 38 (Jan. 1928), 44.
 9. Carpenter, Emerson and Asia, 14.
10. Edward W. Emerson, ed., The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 12 vols.
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903–1904), IV, 39. Unless otherwise indicated, subsequent
references are to this edition; hereafter cited as Works.
11. Emerson, Works, IV, 53–54.
12. Ibid., 47.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., 52.
16. Robert E. Spiller, et al., eds., The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), I, 92–93.
17. JMN, II, 218.
18. In 1850 Emerson began to keep a separate journal entitled “The Orientalist”
where he entered, observes Carpenter, “the philosophy of India, the poetry of Persia
and Arabia, and the wisdom of all the Oriental countries at once. And from this source
he drew much of the richness which he was to put into his later essays.” Carpenter,
Emerson and Asia, 22.
19. Emerson, Works, IV, 76.
 Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Muslim Orient 89

20. Emerson, Works, X, 179.

21. JMN, X, 90. In another entry in the journals Emerson writes: “With our Saxon
education and habit of thought we all require to be first. Each man must somehow think
himself the first in his own career,” JMN, IX, 218–19.
22. JMN, XIV, 166.
23. Clarence Gohdes, ed., Uncollected Lectures by Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York:
William E. Rudge, 1932), 54.
24. Ibid. 60.
25. Emerson, Works, VI, 5.
26. Sa‘di, The Gulistan: Rose Garden of Saadi, trans. Francis Gladwin (Boston:
Ticknor and Fields, 1865), ix.
27. Emerson, Works, VIII, 238–239.
28. Ibid., 418.
29. Emerson, Works, VI, 29.
30. Ibid., 40.
31. Emerson, Works, VIII, 250.
32. Emerson, Works, VI, 57.
33. Ibid., 325.
34. Emerson, Works, VIII, 244–245.
35. Ibid., 246.
36. Ibid., 249–250.
37. Ibid., 250.
38. Ibid.
39. Emerson, Works, IX, 13.
40. Emerson, Works, IV, 205–206.
41. Emerson, Works, IX, 134.
42. Ibid., 132.
43. Ibid., 130.
44. Gladwin, Gulistan, v–vii.
45. Emerson, Works, IX, 130.
46. Emerson, Works, VIII, 247.
47. Ibid., ix.
48. JMN, IX, 68–70.
49. Carpenter, Emerson and Asia, 179.
50. Ibid., 171.
51. Emerson, Works, VIII, 249–50.
52. JMN, IX, 38.
53. Emerson, Works, VIII, 121.
54. JMN, IX, 39.
55. Emerson, Works, VIII, 254.
56. JMN, VII, 452.
57. Emerson, Works, VIII, 98.
58. Spiller, The Collected Works, I, 157.
59. Literally meaning “by way of God,” is an expression meaning “doing some-
thing for God.”
60. Spiller, The Collected Works, I, 158–59.
90 Marwan M. Obeidat

61. JMN, VIII, 342.

62. In the essay on “Woman,” read before the Woman’s Rights Convention, held
in Boston in 1855, Emerson criticizes “Mahomet’s opinion that women have not a suf-
ficient moral or intellectual force to control the perturbations of their physical structure.”
Works, XI, 417.
63. JMN, V, 343.
 4

Emerson and Aspects of Sa‘di’s

Reception in Nineteenth-Century America

Parvin Loloi

Sa‘di has been known in the West since 1634 when André du Ryer produced
French selections of the Gulistan entitled L’Empire des Roses. In his introduction
he called Sa‘di the “prince des Poétes Turcs et Persans.” He emphasized the need
to translate and study those authors who were most valued in the East. This
sentiment was to be echoed very forcefully a century and a half later by Sir
William Jones. In 1651 the Dutch Orientalist, George Gentius (Gentz), published
an edition of the Gulistan with a complete translation into Latin as Rosarium.
The first full (though free) German translation of the Gulistan was published in
1654 by Adam Olearius (Ölschlager) under the title of Der Persianischer Rosenthal.
This was quickly translated into Dutch by J. V. Duisberg, and the German version
itself was reissued three times before the end of the century. In a later edition,
Olearius appended a translation of the Bustan (as Der Baumgarten) which he had
made from a Dutch version. These translations, and the various further adapta-
tions made from them, were very influential in the next century in Europe. In
France, Voltaire presented his Zadig as a translation from Sa‘di; Johann Herder in
Germany, and Joseph Addison in England, both adapted fables from the Bustan
and the Gulistan. Herder’s Blumen aus Morgenländischen Dichtern Gesammelt was
made up mainly of quotations from the Gulistan.1 The European image of Persian
literature during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be understood
from Herder’s admiring words; it was highly appreciated by intellectuals:

Sa‘di, “the pleasant teacher of morals,” as he says, “seems to have

plucked the flower of moralizing poetry in his language . . . as his
poetry was and still is regarded as a rose of the Persian tongue.” His
simple but elegant style, his practical wisdom, his charming anecdotes

91
92 Parvin Loloi

made him a poet who appealed greatly to the Europeans, especially

during the Age of Reason, and he has rightly been considered the
Persian poet whose work is easiest for Westerners to understand. “His
genius is less alien to the West than that of others, his imagination
less overbearing,” as Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall wrote in 1818,
and this indefatigable Austrian orientalist chose two of Sa‘di’s verses
to be engraved on his tombstone.2

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, particularly with the publication
of Sir William Jones’s voluminous works and translations from Eastern languages
into English, French, and Latin, the center of Oriental studies shifted, and now
flourished in Britain. Jones, in his Persian Grammar, recommends to the student of
Persian that the first book that he should read ought to be “the Gulistan or Bed
of Roses, a work which is highly esteemed in the East,” and in his History of the
Persian Language Jones writes that “SADI, a native of this city [Shiraz], flourished
in the thirteenth century, . . . his life was almost wholly spent in travel; but no
man who enjoyed the greatest leisure, ever left behind him more valuable fruits
of his genius and industry.”3 Jones, despite his fondness for Hafiz, translated several
passages from Sa‘di including the fables of The Scented Mud (Gel-i Khushbu), the
Rain Drop, and a passage which shows Sa‘di’s use of Arabic and Persian.4 The
first full English version of the Gulistan, by Francis Gladwin, did not, however,
appear until 1822; it was followed by James Ross’s translation in 1823.5
In America, as in Europe, Sa‘di’s fables were known from the early seven-
teenth century onward, even if the anonymous form in which they were usually
known made plagiarism easy.6 The flourishing of Oriental studies in Europe
meant that American periodicals such as The Literary Magazine and American
Register, The American Quarterly Review, Portfolio, and others7 reviewed German,
French, and English translations from Persian, as well as reprinting some of the
English translations and articles on Persian poetry. There were also frequent
translations from German and French into American English. A variety of pub-
lished studies and translations also found their way across the Atlantic soon
after publication. These proved fertile ground for the Oriental interests of the
Transcendentalists of New England, particularly those based in Concord and
headed by Ralph Waldo Emerson. As early as 1814, Emerson was reading Jones
and his six-volume folio edition of Sir William Jones’s Works, with all its many
translations from Arabic, Hindi, and Persian, as well as Jones’s various scholarly
essays on a range of Oriental subjects. As in Britain, Jones’s Works were “among
the most influential Oriental books read in Concord.”8 For the most part Sa‘di
and other Persian poets were thought of as insignificant—as one reviewer of the
French Gulistan wrote in The American Quarterly Review, in 1830; he

fervently expressed the hope that there would not be in America such
 Emerson and Aspects of Sa‘di’s Reception 93

vogue of Persian Poetry as there had been in Europe. He considered

as doggerel those would be translations which sought to merit that
name by the mere “infusion of such words as gul, bubul, harem, peri.”
He regarded much of Persian poetry as puerile . . . [and] proceeded
to attack not only the popularizers of Persian Poetry but also the
father of English Orientalism, Jones himself, whom he compared
unfavourably with the French Orientalist d’Herbelot.9

Despite such opinions, Sa‘di and Hafiz became the most widely read Persian
poets in nineteenth-century America, in part because of the governing spirit of
the age. As Arthur Christy so aptly writes:

To understand the “orientalism” of the nineteenth century we must

comprehend the Romantic temper, which included more than
mere poetic interest in something “far away and long ago.” It was
the expression of a state of mind rather than a literary movement.10

It was precisely this state of mind which created the Romantic Movement both
in Europe and in America. The beginning of the nineteenth century saw the
emergence of Romanticism in America, which reached its peak by the middle
of the century. This, in the words of Luther S. Mansfield,

suggests a unity or basic similarity among at least the major writers

of that period which is not superficially apparent. Clearly many dis-
tinctive features of European Romanticism were echoed in American
writing. In contrast to the neo-classicism of the eighteenth century
with emphasis on the norm, the timeless, the standards and con-
ventions of the group, Romanticism, here as elsewhere, stressed the
bizarre, the unique, the individual.11

Mansfield points out that

[t]his peak period of American literary Romanticism has been called

“the golden day” by Lewis Mumford, and “the American Renaissance”
by F. O. Mathiessen . . . and by Van Wyck Brooks under headings
of “the flowering of New England” and “the age of Melville and
Whitman.” Just as properly and perhaps more descriptively, it may
be labelled the age of Emerson or somewhat explicitly, the age of
the Emersonian idiom. Nature, Self-Reliance, The Poet, Experience and
Fate are essential essays for defining this idiom. Any attempt to deal
94 Parvin Loloi

with the authors of the period . . . should begin with at least this

much of the Emerson canon.12

Here we need to concern ourselves with two of these essays: “The Poet,” and
“Nature.”
In his essay, “Books,” Emerson writes that the religious books of each
nation are the best. They are, according to his idiom, “sacred.” There is also
another group of books which

have acquired a semi-canonical authority in the world, as express-

ing the highest sentiment and hope of nations. Such are “Hermes
Trismegistus,” pretending to be Egyptian remains; the “Sentences” of
Epictetus; of Marcus Antoninus; the “Vishnu Sarma” of Hindoos; the
“Gulistan” of Saadi; the “Imitation of Christ,” of Thomas a Kempis;
and the “Thoughts” of Pascal.
All these books are the majestic expressions of the universal
conscience, and are more to our daily purpose than this year’s alma-
nac or this day’s newspaper. But they are for the closet, and to be
read on bended knees. Their communications are not to be given
or taken with the lips and the end of tongue, but out of the glow
of the cheek, and with throbbing heart. . . . They are not to be held
by letters printed on a page, but are living characters translatable into
every tongue and form of life. I read them on lichens and barks; I
watch them on waves on the beach; they fly in birds, they creep in
worms; I detect them in laughter and blushes and eye-sparkles of
men and women. These are Scriptures which the missionary might
well carry over prairie, desert, and ocean, to Siberia, Japan, Timbac-
too. Yet he will find that the spirit which is in them journeys faster
than he, and greets him on his arrival,—was there long before him.13

If Emerson thought of the Gulistan as a “sacred” book with universal spirit, then
it is reasonable to suggest that Sa‘di himself—along with some other writers of
Europe and the East—was one of his ideal poets.
Emerson’s interest in Sa‘di began when he was only eleven years of age. In
his early Journal of November 1814 he writes about originality, declaring that “so
there are fountains all around Milton or Saadi or Menu from which they drew.”14
Elsewhere he juxtaposes two names: “Chaucer Saadi.”15 “By October 1843 he
had ‘had the Gulistan of Saadi,’ on whom he had earlier written verses in The
Dial.”16 However, Emerson bypasses Sa‘di in his essay Persian Poetry, published
in 1858, except for the mention of his name in the first paragraph.17 It seems
evident from Emerson’s Journals that he had read little of Sa‘di at this date—or
perhaps he was saving his thoughts for later. He had known at least the names
 Emerson and Aspects of Sa‘di’s Reception 95

of many Persian poets since his student days at Harvard and read some of their
works in Jones but did not study their work systematically. In January of 1861
he had started reading and translating from the Bustan. His sources were the
German translations by K. F Graf, Moslichedden Sadi’s Lustgarten (Bustan), and
Moslichedin Sadi’s Rosengarten, (Gulistan), as well as Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall’s
Geschichte der schonen Redekunste Persiens mit einer Bluethenlese aus zweyhundert
persischen Dichtern. By 1863 Emerson was fully immersed in the study of Sa‘di,
as his Journal of this year amply illustrates. His notes and translations from Sa‘di
during this period found their way into his introduction to the first American
reprint of the Gulistan by Francis Gladwin, published in Boston in 1865, and
into his poem Saadi.18 Some of the translations he read were also influential in
other areas of his own poetry, as noted by Yohannan.19 Yohannan has also identi-
fied the various German sources that Emerson used for his English versions.20
One English editor of Emerson’s prose works describes him as “a moral
and intellectual preacher for a free platform. His soul, imbibing the lessons of
all ages, in communion with the springs of Nature, fervently sympathising with
aspirations of his fellow men. . . .”21 It is, then, hardly surprising that Emerson
should have been attracted to the most explicit moralist amongst the poets of
Persian literature. These two poets, Emerson and Sa‘di, have more in common
than first meets the eye. Both poets seem to have launched themselves on
journeys of discovery round about their thirtieth years of age—Sa‘di’s travels
occupying about thirty years—but both poets owe many of their creative insights
to their roamings. Sa‘di wrote his Bustan and Gulistan soon after his return to
his birthplace of Shiraz around 1256, and Emerson’s first essay, “Nature,” was
published in 1836, two years after his first trip to Europe. Therefore, for Emerson,
Sa‘di was a kindred soul whose

varied and severe experience took away all provincial tone, and
gave him a facility of speaking to all conditions. But the command-
ing reason of his treatment, expands the local forms and tints to a
cosmopolitan breath. Through his Persian dialect he speaks to all
nations, and like Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Montaigne, is
perpetually modern.22

At the beginning of his Preface Emerson betrays some of the common assump-
tions underlying Western views of Oriental literature in this period:

At first sight, the Oriental rhetoric does not please our Western taste.
Life in the East wants the complexity of European and American
existence; and in their writing a certain monotony betrays the pov-
erty of the landscape, and of social conditions. We fancy we are soon
familiar with all their images. Medschun [Majnun] and Leila, rose
96 Parvin Loloi

and nightingale, parrots and tulips, mosques and dervishes . . . insane

compliments to the Sultan, borrowed from the language of prayer;
Hebrew and Gueber [Zoroastrian] legends molten into Arabesque;—
’tis a short inventory of topics and tropes, which incessantly return in
Persian poetry. I do not know but, at first encounter, many readers
take also an impression of tawdry rhetoric, an exaggeration, and a
taste for scarlet, running to borders of negrofine.23

A few lines later he not only refutes this line of thought but blames it on a
lack of understanding on the part of European and American readers of Persian
poetry. He goes on to say that

[t]hese blemishes disappear or diminish on better acquaintance. Where

there is real merit, we are soon reconciled to differences of taste.
The charge of monotony lies more against the numerous Western
imitations than against the Persians themselves, and though the torrid,
like the arctic zone, puts some limit to variety, it is least felt in the
masters. It is the privilege of genius to play its game indifferently
with few as with many pieces, as Nature draws all her opulence out
of a few elements.24

In his Journal of 1847 Emerson expounds his thoughts on dictionaries and

autobiography and writes that:

An autobiography should be a book of answers from one individual

to the main questions of the time. Shall he be a scholar? . . . Shall
he seek to be rich? Shall he go for the ascetic or the [popular] con-
ventional life? He being aware of the double consciousness.—Shall
he value mathematics? Read Dante? Or not? Aristophanes? Plato?
Cosmogonies, & scholar’s courage. What shall he say of Poetry? What
of Astronomy? What of Religion?
Then let us hear his conclusions respecting government &
politics. Does he pay taxes and record his deeds? . . . does Goethe’s
Authobiography answer these questions? So of love, of marriage, so
of playing providence. It should be a true Conversation’s Lexicon for
earnest men. Saadi’s Gulistan is not far from this. It should confirm
the reader in his best sentiment. It should go for imagination & taste.
It should aspire & worship.25

Here, “Conversation’s Lexicon” refers to F. A. Brockhaus’s German Konversations-

Lexikon—a monumental encyclopaedia, which later became known simply as
Brockhaus and is still used today. It is interesting to note that as early as 1847
 Emerson and Aspects of Sa‘di’s Reception 97

Emerson had Sa‘di’s Gulistan in his mind as an encyclopaedic work which ranked
among some of the major European works of this nature. These thoughts were
reflected in his Preface to the Gulistan. Eighteen years later Sa‘di is compared to
two of the most renowned lexicographers of France and Britain.

Saadi exhibits perpetual variety of situation and incident, and an

equal depth of experience with Cardinal de Rez in Paris, or Doctor
Johnson in London. He finds room on his narrow canvas for the
extremes of lot, the play of motives, the rule of destiny, the lessons
of morals, and the portraits of great men. He has furnished the
originals of a multitude of tales and proverbs which are current in
our mouths, and attributed by us to recent writers; as, for example,
the story of “Abraham and the Fire-worshipper,” once claimed for
Doctor Franklin, and afterwards traced to Jeremy Taylor, who prob-
ably found it in Olearius.26

Comparing Hafiz and Sa‘di, Emerson asserts that

Saadi, though he has not the lyric flights of Hafiz, has wit, practical
sense, and just moral sentiments. He has the instinct to teach, and
from every occurrence must draw the moral, like Franklin. He is the
poet of friendship, love, self-devotion, and serenity. There is a uniform
force in his page, and conspicuously, a tone of cheerfulness, which has
almost made his name a synonym for this grace. The word “Saadi”
means “fortunate.” In him the trait is no result of levity, much less
of convivial habit, but first of a happy nature, to which victory is
habitual, easily shedding mishaps, with sensibility to pleasure, and with
resources against pain. But it also results from habitual perception of
the beneficent laws that control the world. He inspires in the reader
a good hope. What a contrast between the cynical tone of Byron
and the benevolent wisdom of Saadi!27

After vilifying one the most famous of the English Romantic poets, Emerson
goes on to discuss the style of Persian poetry in general and of Sa‘di in particular:

To the sprightly and indolent Persians, conversation is a game of

skill. They wish to measure wit with you, and expect an adroit,
a brilliant, or a profound answer. Many narratives, doubtless, have
suffered in the translation, since a promising anecdote sometimes
heralds a flat speech. But Saadi’s replies are seldom vulgar. His wit
answers to the heart of the question, often quite over the scope of
the inquirer. He has also that splendor of expression which alone,
98 Parvin Loloi

without wealth of thought, sometimes constitutes a poet, and forces

us to ponder the problem of style. In his poem on old age, he says:
“Saadi’s whole power lies in his sweet words: let this gift remain to
me, I care not what is taken.”28

A couple of pages later, Emerson speaks again of the discontinuity of themes

in Persian Poetry, especially those written in the form of the ghazal and the
qasidah—a failure to understand the thematic unity of Persian poetry which
was common among both translators and scholars of Persian poetry from the
late eighteenth to the mid twentieth century in both Europe and America.29
Emerson continues:

In a country where there are no libraries and no printing, people

must carry wisdom in sentences. Wonderful is the inconsecutiveness
of the Persian Poets. European criticism finds that the unity of a
beautiful whole is everywhere wanting. Not only the story is short,
but no two sentences are joined. In looking through Von Hammer’s
anthology, culled from a paradise of poets, the reader feels this painful
discontinuity. ’Tis sand without lime,—as if the neighboring desert
had saharized the mind. It was said of Thomson’s Seasons, that the
page would read as well by omitting every alternate line. But the
style of Thomson is glue and bitumen to the loose and irrecover-
able ramble of Oriental bards. No topic is too remote for their
rapid suggestion. The Ghaselle or Kassida is a chapter of proverbs,
or proverbs unchaptered, unthreaded beads of all colors, sizes, and
values. Yet two topics are sure to return in any and every proximity,
the mistress and the name of the poet. Out of every ambush these
leap on the unwary reader. Saadi, in the Gulistan, by the necessity
of the narrative, corrects this arid looseness, which appears, however,
in his odes and elegies, as in Hafiz and Dschami [Jami]. As for the
incessant return of the poet’s name,—which appears to be a registry
of copyrights,—the Persians often relieve this heavy custom by wit
and audacious sallies.30

Emerson could not have consciously contrived a more graphic picture of his
total failure to comprehend characteristic Persian poetical forms. He has here
reproduced once more exactly the charges which have repeatedly been laid
against Hafiz. As regards the philosophy of Sa‘di, however, he redeems himself
by writing that the

Sheik’s (Sheikh’s) mantle sits loosely on Saadi’s shoulders, and I find

in him a pure theism. He asserts the universality of moral laws, and
the perpetual retributions. He celebrates the omnipotence of a virtu-
 Emerson and Aspects of Sa‘di’s Reception 99

ous soul. A certain intimate and avowed piety, obviously in sympathy

with the feeling of his nation, is habitual to him. All the forms of
courtesy and of business in daily life take a religious tinge, as did
those of Europe in the Middle Ages.
With the exception of a few passages, of which we need not
stop to give account, the morality of the Gulistan and Bostan is pure,
and so little clogged with the superstition of the country, that this
does not interfere with the pleasure of the modern reader: he can
easily translate their ethics into his own. Saadi praises alms, hospitality,
justice, courage, bounty, and humility. . . .31

Finally Emerson concludes his introduction by going a long way toward

negating his earlier statements when he referred to the Persians as “indolent.”
He writes,

The Persians have been called “the French of Asia;” and their supe-
rior intelligence, their esteem for men of learning; their welcome
to Western travellers, and their tolerance of Christian sects in their
territory, . . . would seem to derive from the rich culture of this
great choir of poets, perpetually reinforced through five hundred
years, which again and again has enabled the Persians to refine and
civilize their conquerors, and to preserve a national identity. To the
expansion of this influence there is no limit; and we wish that the
present republication may add to the genius of Saadi a new audi-
ence in America.32

Emerson’s poem Saadi was first published in The Dial in 1842. As we have seen,
he had not yet studied Sa‘di thoroughly at this date, but Sa‘di had nevertheless
become one of his ideal poets. Some years later, after writing his introduction
to the Gulistan, he is thought to have gone back to the poem to make sure
that he had understood and written about Sa‘di correctly in those early years.33
His poem Saadi has hitherto received very little critical study,34 so it is apt to
attempt a more detailed account here. The poem, despite its length, deserves
quotation in full:

Saadi

Trees in groves,
Kine in droves,
In ocean sport the scaly herds,
Wedge-like cleave the air the birds,
To northern lakes fly wind-borne ducks,
Browse the mountain sheep in flocks,
100 Parvin Loloi

Men consort in camp and town,

But the poet dwells alone.

God, who gave to him the lyre,

Of all mortals the desire,
For all breathing men’s behoof,
Straitly charged him, ‘Sit aloof;’
Annexed a warning, poets say,
To the bright premium,—
Ever, when twain together play,
Shall the harp be dumb.

Many may come,

But one shall sing;
Two touch the string,
The harp is dumb,
Though there come a million,
Wise Saadi dwells alone.

Yet Saadi loved the race of men,—

No churl, immured in cave or den;
In bower and hall
He wants them all,
Nor can dispense
With Persia for his audience;
They must give ear,
Grow red with joy and white with fear;
But he has no companion;
Come Ten, or come a million,
Good Saadi dwells alone.

Be thou ware where Saadi dwells;

Wisdom of the gods is he,—
Entertain it reverently.
Gladly round that golden lamp
Sylvan deities encamp,
And simple maids and noble youth
Are welcome to the man of truth.
Most welcome they who need him most,
They feed the spring which they exhaust;
For greater need
 Emerson and Aspects of Sa‘di’s Reception 101

Draws better deed:

But, critic, spare thy vanity,
Nor show thy pompous parts,
To vex with odious subtlety
The cheerer of men’s hearts.

Sad-eyed Fakirs swiftly say

Endless dirges to decay,
Never in the blaze of light
Lose the shudder of midnight;
Pale at overflowing noon
Hear wolves barking at the moon;
In the bower of dalliance sweet
Hear the far Avenger’s feet:
And shake before those awful Powers,
Who in their pride forgive not ours.
Thus the sad-eyed Fakirs preach:
‘Bard, when thee would Allah teach,
And lift thee to his holy mount,
He sends thee from his bitter fount
Wormhood,—saying, “Go thy ways,
Drink not the Malaga of praise,
But do the deed thy fellows hate,
And compromise thy peaceful state,
Smite the white breads which thee fed,
Stuff sharp thorns beneath the head
Of them thou shouldst have comforted;
For out of woe and out of crime
Draws the heart a lore sublime.”’
And yet it seemeth not to me
That the high gods love tragedy;
For Saadi sat in the sun,
And thanks was his contrition;
For haircloth and for bloody whips,
Had active hands and smiling lips;
And yet his runes he rightly read,
And to his folk his message sped.
Sunshine in his heart transferred
Lighted each transparent word,
And well could honouring Persia learn
What Saadi wished to say;
102 Parvin Loloi

For Saadi’s nightly stars did burn

Brighter than Dshami’s day.

Whispered the Muse in Saadi’s cot.

‘O gentle Saadi, listen not,
Tempest by thy praise of wit,
Or by thirst and appetite
For the talents not thine own,
To sons of contradiction.
Never, son of eastern morning.
Follow falsehood, follow scorning
Denounce who will, who will deny
And pile the hills to scale the sky;
Let theist, atheist, pantheist,
Define and wrangle how they list,
Fierce conserver, fierce destroyer,—
But thou, joy-giver and enjoyer,
Unknowing war, unknowing crime,
Gentle Saadi, mind thy rhyme;
Heed not what the brawlers say,
Head thou only Saadi’s lay.

‘Let the great world bustle on

With war and trade, with camp and town:
A thousand men shall dig and eat;
At forge and furnace thousand sweat;
And thousand sail the purple sea,
And give or take the stroke of war,
Or crowd the market and bazzar;
Oft shall war end, and peace return,
And cities rise where cities burn,
Ere one man my hill shall climb,
Who can turn the golden rhyme.
Let them manage how they may,
Heed thou only Saadi’s lay.
Seek the living among the dead,—
Man in man is imprisoned;
Barefooted Dervish is not poor,
If fate unlock his bosom’s door,
So that what his eye has seen
His tongue can paint as bright, as keen;
And what his tender heart hath felt
 Emerson and Aspects of Sa‘di’s Reception 103

With equal fire thy heart shalt melt.

For, whom the Muses smile upon,
And touch with soft persuasion,
His words like a storm-wind can bring
Terror and beauty on their wing;
In his every syllable
Lurketh nature veritable;
And thou he speaks in midnight dark,—
In heaven no star, on earth no spark,—
Yet before the listener’s eye
Swims the world in ecstasy,
The forest waves, the morning breaks,
The pastures sleep, ripple the lakes,
Leaves twinkle, flowers like persons be,
And life pulsates in rock or tree.
Saadi, so far thy words shall reach:
Suns rise and we set in Saadi’s speech!’

And thus to Saadi said the Muse:

‘Eat thou the bread which men refuse:
Flee from the goods which from thee flee;
Seek nothing,—Fortune seeketh thee.
Not mount, nor dive; all good things keep
The midway of eternal deep.
Wish not to fill the isles with eyes
To fetch thee birds of paradise:
On thine orchard’s edge belong
All the brags of plume and song;
Wise Ali’s sunbright sayings pass
For proverbs in the market-place:
Through mountains bored by regal art,
Toil whistles as he drives his cart.
Nor scour the seas, nor sift mankind,
A poet or a friend to find:
Behold, he watches at the door!
Behold his shadow on the floor!
Open innumerable doors
The heaven where unveiled Allah pours
The flood of truth, the flood of good,
The Seraph’s and the Cherub’s food.
Those doors are men: the Pariah hind
Admits thee to perfect Mind.
104 Parvin Loloi

Seek not beyond thy cottage wall

Redeemers that can yield thee all:
While thou sittest at thy door
On the desert’s yellow floor,
Listening to the gray-haired crones,
Foolish gossips, ancient drones,
Saadi, see! They rise in stature
To the height of mighty Nature,
And the secret stands revealed
Fraudulent Time in vain concealed,—
That blessed gods in servile masks
Plied for thee thy household tasks.’35

Emerson’s poem is essentially an exercise in Romanticism. The first stanza cre-

ates the image of the poet as solitary. It is not that he is anti-social, but rather
that the activity of poetic creativity is by its very nature solitary, and thus “the
poet dwells alone.” In the second stanza we are told that the poet’s gift as a
musician of words is God-given, and for this reason, too, he “sits aloof,” separate
from others; even were another poet to join him the two would not be able
to strike a harmonious chord together, since each must, of necessity, create in
solitude; thus Sa‘di, who is wise, “dwells alone.” This solitude on the part of the
poet does not grow from contempt for common humanity—“Saadi loved the
race of men.” Indeed the poet needs the whole of “Persia for his audience” who
“must give ear” to his poetry; and yet, paradoxically, even if Sa‘di finds a million
for his audience, he is still alone. The refrain in the third stanza refers to Sa‘di
as “Good,” so our Persian is not only wise, but he is also an emblem of moral
goodness in his solitude. In the first three stanzas the use of the refrain intensi-
fies the notion of the poet’s loneliness—an ideal of Western Romantic thought.
The fourth stanza reflects on the kind of dwelling place that Sa‘di occu-
pies. Emerson warns the reader “Be thou ware where Saadi dwells.” This kind
of caution is again a Romantic notion, when it comes to attitudes towards the
poet. Emerson might have had Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan in mind,
where Coleridge writes:

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!36

Sa‘di, the man of “truth,” dwells in a place of light where woodland nymphs,
“Sylvan deities,” also inhabit and where the simple and the innocent are welcome.
“They feed the spring which they exhaust.” “Spring” as the source of pure water,
 Emerson and Aspects of Sa‘di’s Reception 105

in both the Western poetical tradition and in Persian Sufi poetry, is a symbol of
poetic inspiration, so here while the youth and the innocent play their part in
inspiring the poet they also exhaust the spring’s sources for their own needs. In
Sa‘di’s garden of light, the critics “who show [their] pompous parts, / To vex with
odious subtlety / The cheerer of men’s hearts” are not welcome. The next stanza
illustrates the preaching of the puritanical moralists the—“Sad-eyed Fakirs”—who
do not sit in the “light,” but rather in darkness and who, even in the height of the
day with its bright sun, bark like wolves; like an “avenger” in the sweet smelling
garden they admonish the poet, saying that he should use his God-given power to
offer teachings from the “bitter fount” of life and its misery, that he should not be
drinking the wine—the “Malaga”—“of praise.” He should make his audience suffer,
“For out of woe and out of crime / Draws the heart a lore sublime.” Emerson
then offers the suggestion that the gods do not love tragedy, because “Saadi sat
in the sun” and, despite his suffering, he had “smiling lips” and read the “runes”
(mysteries) correctly and thus “Sunshine in his heart transferred / Lighted each
transparent word.” The images used here of righteous Fakirs and “critics” may
have come from Emerson’s reading of Hafiz, as Yohannan has pointed out.37 If,
further, we compare these lines to a passage from the Bustan, it becomes evident
that Emerson’s idea of a poet of light is actually Sa‘di’s own description of himself:

All the lines of these books are veiled,

Which will fall down for a heart-ravishing face.

There are hidden meanings in every black letter,

Like a veiled beloved and a moon under the clouds.

In Sa‘di’s heart there is no room for sadness,

Since he has many beautiful faces behind the veil.

My words light up an assembly,

They, like fire, exude light and warmth.38

This seventh stanza of Emerson’s poem concludes by comparing Sa‘di with

Jami,39 whose days lack the brightness of Sa‘di’s nights.
In the eighth stanza of the poem, Sa‘di is described as “gentle,” a poet
whose muse whispers in his ears while still a babe in his cot and advises him
not to listen to the warring creeds, whether “theist, atheist, pantheist,” because
they are “Fierce Conserver[s], fierce destroyer[s],” whereas Sa‘di is a “joy-giver
and enjoyer,” who does not know any war or crime (this is obviously Emerson’s
early idealistic notion which is corrected in the Preface, p. viii). The poem finishes
with the advice “Heed thou only Saadi’s lay” which is repeated half way down
the next stanza, after continuing the same theme but with more vivid images of
106 Parvin Loloi

a war, not clearly either Western or Eastern. Through the chaos and destruction
only “one man my hill shall climb, / Who can turn the golden rhyme.” The
imagery of the warring nations conjures up a famous line of Hafiz:

Excuse all the wars of the seventy two nations,

Since they did not see the way of truth, they chose the way of
fable.40

The second half of the ninth stanza could be interpreted as, in essence, a
statement of a key Sufi doctrine. “Man in Man is imprisoned,” suggests that the
soul is imprisoned in the cage of the body and that the “barefooted dervish,”
presumably Sa‘di, is not poor, in truth. He has seen what no ordinary man has,
and therefore “his tender heart hath felt, / With equal fire thy heart shall melt.”
The muses shine on every word of Sa‘di, whose “words like a storm-wind can
bring / Terror and beauty on their wing; / In his every syllable / Lurketh nature
veritable.” Nature is an important aspect of almost all mystical philosophies, as
will be discussed later. This stanza finishes with more images of light and faraway
lands where Emerson hopes that Sa‘di’s “words shall reach” because the light of
the day belongs to him.
The last stanza continues with the muse’s advice to Sa‘di—that he should
be moderate because “all good things keep / the midway of eternal deep.” He
should not seek the “birds of paradise,” since the boundaries of his humble
“orchard wall” hold all that he needs—and more—because just as words and
sayings of the prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali, have become common knowl-
edge and found their way to every “market-place,” so too will Sa‘di’s. Sa‘di is
advised that whatever is valuable is already near him. He only has to look and
see with his mind’s eye, and then he can open “innumerable doors.” “Those
doors are men”—even the social outcast amongst men, any “pariah,” can open
the door to the sanctuary of the “unveiled Allah,” where he will be flooded
with “truth” and “good,” where angels will give him heavenly food and he can
be admitted to the presence of the “perfect Mind,” the Supreme Intelligence
or God. The poem concludes with a quintessentially Emersonian concept of
Man and Nature. The speaker, who is still the “muse,” tells Sa‘di “not to look
beyond thy cottage wall,” because the redeemer is within him. When he sits on
his doorstep and watches the old, the decrepit, and the ugly gossip foolishly in
their monotonous tones, he should recognise that even they can reveal the true
and lofty nature of man, and thus reveal the secret which even “Time,” has failed
to steal. If Sa‘di looks closely and understands, he will recognize that even his
household servants are “gods” in disguise. They, too, can also reveal the essence
of nature and thus of God.
Emerson’s philosophical view of Nature, and of Man as its supreme being,
 Emerson and Aspects of Sa‘di’s Reception 107

is closely related to the ideas of Neoplatonism—but there are also many common
doctrines shared between Sufism and Neoplatonism. Without space or time to
attempt any full account of the complex metaphysical theories of the Persian
philosophers and mystics, a mere couple of examples will have to suffice here.
In a note to Affifi’s41 Commentaries on the most famous of the Western Muslim
Sufis, Ibn ‘Arabi, Henry Corbin writes:

[t]here is the metaphysical theory that Man (mankind) is the most

perfect revelation of all the Divine Attributes, and there is the mysti-
cal theory that certain men, partaking of the category of the Perfect
Man, attain to a level of consciousness in which they experience the
significance of their unity with the divine reality. On this realization
depends the truth of perfect man as a microcosm in actu. . . . But
this microcosmic truth . . . must in turn, when one speaks of the
Perfect Man as a cosmic principle, lead us not to confuse the Haqiqat
al-Haqa’iq (Muhamadic essence, Nous, Holy Spirit) and its concrete
manifestations, namely the class of men (prophets and saints) entering
into this category of Perfect Man.42

A second example can be taken from Hermeticism. Avicenna, the most famous
of those Persian philosophers thought to have been influenced by Greek phi-
losophy, especially that of Aristotle, and whose philosophy has in turn been
influential in the west, notably on Dante,43 holds similar notions of the “Perfect
Man.” Henry Corbin, in comparing The Recital of Hayy ibn yaqzan by Avicenna
and Suhrawardi’s The Recital of the Occidental Exile (al-Ghurbat al-gharbiyyah) with
the Hermetic vision of Poimandres writes:

Just as, in Avicenna and Suhrawardi, the “reciter” receives his vision
either in sleep or in a state between waking and sleep, so the Nous
(‘aql, khrad) appears to Hermes while “his bodily senses were under
restraint” during a deep sleep. It seems to him that a being of vast
magnitude appears before him, calls him by name, and asks: “ ‘What do
you wish to hear and see, to learn and come to know by thought?’
‘Who are you?’ I said. ‘I,’ said he, ‘am Poimandres, the Mind [Nous]
of Sovereignty. . . . I know what you wish, for indeed I am with
you everywhere’ . . . Forthwith all things changed in aspect before
me, and were opened out in a moment. And I beheld a bound-
less view; all was changed into light, a mild and joyous light; and
I marvelled when I saw it.” Later in the course of the vision: “He
gazed long upon me, eye to eye, so that I trembled at his aspect.
And when I raised my head, again, I saw in my mind [Nous] that
108 Parvin Loloi

the light consisted of innumerable Powers, and come to be . . . a

world without bounds . . . And when I was amazed, he spoke again,
and said to me, ‘You have seen in your mind [Nous] the archetypal
form, which is prior to the beginning of things, and is limitless.’
Thus spoke Poimandres to me.” It is of this ecstasy of Hermes that
there is a trace in Suhrawardi, when the Form of Light replies to
Hermes: “I am thy Perfect Nature.”44

While it cannot be demonstrated that Emerson was directly influenced in any

way by Persian poets and philosophers like Avicenna or Suhrawardi, he certainly
knew Hermes Trismegistus and his work when he wrote “Saadi.” Between 1841
and 1843, Emerson

came most fully under the influence of Neoplatonism, while at the

same time he was enlarging his knowledge of the Orient. In 1841
he was reading Proclus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Hermes Trismegistus,
Synesius, and others . . . and was confiding to his Journals his most
enthusiastic praise of the ‘Trismegisti’ or ‘Platonists.’45

Emerson’s study of Platonism, Neoplatonism and Orientalism were concurrent.

In 1845 he published a volume entitled Representative Men, made up those of
the Occident, with no room for the direct reflection of his Oriental reading;
yet in the process of writing his first essay, on Plato, he manages to convert “the
Greek philosopher into half an Orientalist, devoting a large part of the essay to
Oriental aspects of his thought.”46 Therefore “[h]is essay on Plato is the locus
classicus for the expression of Orientalism in Emerson’s writings.”47 Carpenter
argues that “Emerson’s curious concept of Platonism” can be explained by the
history of his reading. He identified Plato with Platonism, declaring in his essay
“it is fair to credit the broadest generalizer with all particulars deducible from
his thesis.” Further, he identified Platonism with Neoplatonism. He credited Plato
with the doctrines that the Neoplatonists of Alexandria had deduced from his
philosophy, and these doctrines bore a strongly Oriental tinge. They represent,
historically, the fusion of Greek Platonism with a mysticism brought from the
Orient by way of Alexandria.48 Emerson’s statement, as described by Carpenter,
is rather flawed. Alexandria was, of course, the center of education and as the
ancient texts were translated into both Arabic and Latin, but the exchange was
a two way discourse, thus the Greek philosophy made its mark on Muslim
philosophers as well. To clarify Emerson’s viewpoint, a couple of passages from
Plato will have to suffice. Talking about Indian philosophy, Emerson also clearly
sets out his own ideas:
 Emerson and Aspects of Sa‘di’s Reception 109

The same, the same: friend and foe are of one stuff; the plough-
man the plough and the farrow are of one stuff; and the stuff is
such and so much that variations of form are unimportant . . . It
is soul,—one in all bodies, pervading, uniform, perfect, pre-eminent
over nature, exempt birth, growth and decay, omnipresent, made up
of true knowledge, independent, unconnected with unrealities, with
name, species, and the rest, in time past, present and to come. The
knowledge that this spirit, which is essentially one, is in one’s own
and in all other bodies, is the wisdom of one who knows the unity
of things. As one diffusive air, passing through the perforations of
a flute, is distinguished as the notes of a scale, so the nature of the
Great Spirit is single, though its forms be manifold. . . .49

Earlier in the same passage Emerson writes, that

[i]n all nations there are minds which incline to dwell in the con-
ception of fundamental Unity. The raptures of prayer and ecstasy of
devotion lose all being in one Being. This tendency finds its highest
expression in the religious writings of the East. . . .50

Thus we can safely assume that the above passage could also easily be applied
to Sufi doctrines, as well as to Neoplatonic philosophy. Indeed at one point in
Plato, Emerson compares a passage from the Qur’an with Plato:

The East is explicit on this point of caste. “Men have their metal, as of
gold and silver. Those of you who were the worthy ones in the state
of ignorance, will be the worthy ones in the state of faith, as soon as
you embrace it.” Plato was no less firm. “Of the five orders of things,
only four can be thought to generality of men.” In the Republic he
insists on the temperaments of the youth, as first of the first.51

Elsewhere he emphasizes that “the notion of virtue is not to be arrived at except

through contemplation of the divine essence.”52
“Divine essence” is the key to the study of Nature, as was seen by the
Romantics in Europe and America. It is also a major doctrine of the Sufi phi-
losophers. The study of Nature was, therefore, an important preoccupation of the
Concordian friends, Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888) and Henry David Thoreau
(1817–1862), headed by Emerson. The three friends shared all the books they
read. Emerson was a founding member of The Dial in 1840, and the first volume
of the magazine contains an article entitled The Divine Presence in Nature and
in Soul. The author is identified by the letter “P.” The article sets out the basic
110 Parvin Loloi

principles of Nature as an emanation of God—a philosophical doctrine which

is shared in almost all religions. The Omnipresence of God is described thus:

He [God] fills the world of outward nature with his presence. The
fullness of divine energy flows inexhaustibly into the crystal of the
rock, the juices of the plant, the splendor of the stars, the life of
the bee and Behemoth. . . . Hence Nature ever grows, and changes,
and becomes something new, as God’s all pervading energy flows
into it without ceasing.

The author goes on to say that “[i]t is an important fact that all parts of nature
are in perfect harmony with God’s will, and therefore reveal all of God that
can be made manifest to the eye, the ear, and other senses of man.” As regards
the manifestation of God in Man, “P” writes “But yet God is present in man as
well as out of him. The divine energy and substance possess the human soul, no
less than they constitute the law and life of outward nature.” “P” further writes
that “His presence revealed in all that is magnificently great, or elegantly little,
renders the world of nature solemn and beautiful.”53 It is then hardly surprising
that Sa‘di, who proudly but succinctly proclaims,

In the eye of the wise, each leaf of the green trees,

is manifestation of the mysteries of God54

should be one of the favorite men of this group of American thinkers, a “Perfect
Man” in terms of both the Sufi and Neoplatonic doctrines. Sa‘di’s lines, naturally,
could have been influenced by either Islamic thought or by the Neoplatonists.
In Islamic philosophy,

man seeks to transcend nature and nature herself can be an aid in this
process provided man can learn to contemplate it, not as an indepen-
dent domain of reality but as a mirror reflecting a higher reality, a vast
panorama of symbols which speak to man and have meaning for him.55

Thus,

a Plotinus, an Avicenna, or a St. Albert the Great would . . . [say]

that in nature there is nothing more evident than the essences of
things, since these manifest themselves in the ‘forms’ themselves. Only,
they cannot be discovered by ‘laborious work of investigation’ nor
measured quantitatively; in fact the intuition that grasps them relies
directly on sensory perception and imagination, inasmuch as the latter
synthesizes the impression received from outside.56

Dante expresses a similar notion in the Divine Comedy:

 Emerson and Aspects of Sa‘di’s Reception 111

. . . Le cose tutte quante

Hann’ ordine tra loro: e questo è forma
Che l’universo a Dio fa simigliante.

. . . All things whatsoever

observe a mutual order; and this is the form
that maketh the universe like unto God.57

It is not, therefore, surprising that Sa‘di should have become one of the most
revered of poets for the Transcendentalists of New England. Emerson, influenced
by his readings of the Western and Eastern philosophers, developed a complex
doctrine of “Nature,” discussion of which is beyond the scope of this article,
but the essence of his thoughts can be summed up in the poem he attached
to his essay on “Nature.”

Nature

The rounded world is fair to see,

Nine times folded in mystery:
Though baffled seers cannot impart
The secret of its labouring heart,
Throb thine with Nature’s throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west.
Spirit that lurks each form within
Beckons to spirit of its kin;
Self-kindled every atom glows,
And hints the future which it owes.58

For Emerson, Sa‘di was, above all, a poet of Nature; this is clear from his poem
Saadi and from a Fragment on the Poet where he writes;

Those idle catches told the laws

Holding Nature to her cause.
. . . 
God only knew how Saadi dined;
Roses he ate, and drank the wind.
. . . 
He felt the flame, the fanning wings,
Nor offered words till they were things.
. . . 
Sun and moon fall amain
Like sower’s seeds into his brain,
There quickened to be born again.59
112 Parvin Loloi

Emerson believed that an ideal poet should speak through the symbolic language
of Nature and its many splendid images. In his essay “The Poet,” Emerson writes
that “nature has a higher end, in the production of new individuals, . . . namely
ascension, or the passage of the soul into higher forms,”60 which is a similar notion
to that of Ibn ‘Arabi as quoted above. The poet thus has access to a “better
perception” through which

he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or meta-
morphosis; perceives that thought is multiform: that within the form
of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend into a higher form;
and following with his eyes the life, uses the forms which express
that life, and so his speech flows with the flowing of nature.61

Poets are thus liberating gods.62

For the Romantics withdrawal into nature was a way towards understanding the
complexities of nature. For such reasons, these three friends in Concord regularly
went to the wildernesses of New England, Thoreau more fully than the oth-
ers. Emerson wrote “We nestle in nature, and draw our living as parasites from
her roots and grains, and we receive glances from the heavenly bodies, which
call us to solitude and foretell the remotest future.”63 It was the related affinity
which these friends felt towards Sa‘di which made Thoreau write in his Journal
of 8 Aug. 1852, that

.  .  .  entertaining a single thought of a certain elevation makes all men

of one religion . . . I know, for instance, that Sadi entertained once
identically the same thought that I do, and there after I can find no
essential difference between Sadi and myself. He is not Persian, he is
not ancient, he is not strange to me. By the identity of his thoughts
with mine he still survives. It makes no odds what atoms serve us.
Sadi possessed no greater privacy or individuality that is thrown open
to me . . . Truth and a true man is something essentially public, not
private. If Sadi were to come back to claim a personal identity with
the historical Sadi, he would find there were too many of us; . . . By
sympathy with Sadi I have embowelled him. In his thought I have
a sample of him, a slice from his core.64

Important Persian poets, as well as other Oriental writers, were, as we have

seen, the objects of serious study by the Romantics of New England. Sa‘di and
Hafiz were the only two Persian poets, taking their place amongst other Ori-
ental religious texts and writers, for whom Emerson in particular showed long
lasting interest. Sa‘di fascinated him more than Hafiz and this was also the case
 Emerson and Aspects of Sa‘di’s Reception 113

with his Transcendentalist friends. Sa‘di lived long and travelled for many years
and wrote most of his work in the later part of his life; his work, perhaps in
consequence, has a kind of astute wisdom and moral judgment which appealed
to Emerson and his friends. Moreover, Sa‘di was a “joy-giver” and “enjoyer” of
Nature—very attractive qualities; therefore Sa‘di

appears much oftener as an ideal poet in Emerson’s writings than

Hafiz. Probably a reason for this is that Emerson felt himself much
more nearly akin to him. Most of the qualities which he ascribes
to the Persian might be used to describe Emerson’s own writing.65

The American Transcendentalists were very much influenced by Kantian

and other German philosophical ideas; but they were also Romantics in the
broader European sense, and like many of their European predecessors they were
fundamentally Neoplatonists. Their interest in Oriental Scriptures, as they called
anything with religious and mystical qualities, was part of a desire for Universal
Knowledge. Emerson in particular employed Sa‘di, like other Oriental writers,
to give illustrative substance to his own thoughts and ideas. He was fascinated
by Goethe and Swedenborg; the first was greatly influenced by Persian poetry
and the second heavily influenced by esoteric Islam. Emerson chose them both
amongst his Representative Men. He is thought to have tinkered with the idea
of including Sa‘di as well, but eventually decided against doing so. Whatever
reasons there might have been behind this change of heart, the fact remains that
Sa‘di remained among the authors whom Emerson held in his mind until late
in his life. His Journal of 1872 mentions the Persian poet by name. A lot more
might be written on Sa‘di and his influence on American writers, especially if
a philosophical comparison were undertaken between Sa‘di’s views of humanity
and man’s place in Nature and those of the American authors. Unfortunately,
the confines of this essay have made it impossible to offer more than a cursory
look at Thoreau, Emerson’s disciple and friend, as well as forcing me to overlook
writers such as Alcott, Alger, Taylor, and others. Still, it was Emerson who was
centrally responsible for the popularity in America of Sa‘di, supreme humanist
and moralist of the Persian poets.

Notes

 1. For this initial information I am indebted to John D. Yohannan’s works on

Sa‘di, which include “The Poet Sa‘di: A Persian Humanist,” Persian Studies Series, no. 11
(New York, 1987); “Persian Literature in Translation,” Persian Literature, ed. Ehsan Yarshater,
(New York: Bibliotheca Persica, 1988); “Persian Poetry in England and America: A Two
Hundred Year History,” Persian Studies Series no. 4 (New York: Delmar, 1977).
114 Parvin Loloi

  2. Annemarie Schimmel, “The Genius of Shiraz: Sa‘di and Hafiz,” Persian Literature
(1988): 214–25. The quotation occurs on 214–15.
  3. Lord Teignmouth, ed., The Works of Sir William Jones, 6 vols. (London, 1799),
V, 178, 433.
 4. These can be found consecutively in Ibid., vol. V, p. 309, 434–6. The fable of
the “Rain drop” is translated into Latin in vol. VI, pp. 273–4.
  5. A full list of these early translations of Sa‘di into English is provided by Yohan-
nan, Persian Poetry, 315–16.
 6. Yohannan in his volume The Poet Sa‘di points out some of the uses made of
Sa‘di’s fables in the West, 3–4.
 7. A complete list of periodicals of the time can be found in Yohannan, Persian
Poetry, 107–14.
  8. Arthur Christy, The Orient in American Transcendentalism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1972), 285.
  9. Yohannan, Persian Poetry, 110.
10. Arthur Christy, The Asian Legacy and American Life (New York: The John Day
Co., 1945), 37.
11. Luther S. Mansfield. “The Emersonian Idiom and The Romantic Period in
American Literature,” Romanticism and the American Renaissance, ed. Kenneth Walter Cam-
eron (Hartford, 1977), 23–28. The quotation is taken from 23.
12. Ibid., 23–4.
13. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Books,” Society and Solitude, from Emerson’s Complete
Works, 12 vols. (London: Riverside Edition, 1883–94), vol. VII, 208–9 (henceforth, Works).
14. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, various editors,
16 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1976), vol. VIII, 67. (henceforth, J&N)
15. Ibid., XII, 362.
16. Ralph L. Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1949), 310.
17. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Persian Poetry,” The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 1 (April
1858), 724–34.
18. J&N., XV, 89, 354–78, 382–386, 396, 399–400. The editors have identified the
passages which were later incorporated into his introduction to the Gulistan.
19. J. D. Yohannan, “The Influence of Persian Poetry Upon Emerson’s Work,”
American Literature, vol. 15, no. 1, (1944), 25–41, and his Persian Poetry, 127–32.
20. J. D.Yohannan, “Emerson’s Translations of Persian Poetry from German Sources,”
American Literature, vol. 14, no. 4, (Jan. 1943), 407–420.
21. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, With
a Critical Introduction (London: Ward, Lock, and Bowden, 1889), v.
22. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Preface” to The Gulistan, Or Rose Garden by Musle-
Huddeen Saadi of Shiraz, trans. Francis Gladwin (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865), viii.
23. Ibid., iv–v.
24. Ibid., v.
25. J&N, X, 48.
26. Emerson, “Preface” to Gulistan, v.
27. Ibid., vii–viii.
28. Ibid., viii–ix
 Emerson and Aspects of Sa‘di’s Reception 115

29. For a comprehensive discussion of the various theories about unity in the
ghazals of Hafiz see Parvin Loloi, Hafiz, Master of Persian Poetry: A Critical Bibliography;
English Translations since the Eighteenth Century (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), 13–45.
30. Emerson, “Preface” to The Gulistan, xi–xii.
31. Ibid., x.
32. Ibid., xv.
33. Yohannan, Persian Poetry, 116, 280, note 329.
34. Though the brief discussion in Lawrence Buell’s Emerson (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2003) is of interest, not least for his observation that Emerson “imagines
[Sa‘di] as a kind of cheerful hippie, content to live in squalor and take what inspiration
brings” (141).
35. Emerson, Works, IX, 114–19. Emerson’s poem has been translated into Persian
by Farhang Jahanpour in “Sa‘di va Emerson,” Iran Nameh, vol. 3, no. 4, 1985, pp. 690–704.
36. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest
Hartley Coleridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), 298.
37. John Yohannan, “The Influence of Persian Poetry upon Emerson,” 31.
38. Sa‘di, Bustan, ed. Gholam-Hossein Yusofi (Tehran, 1369/1990 (first published
1359/1980)), 167, ls. 3228–31. (The translations are by myself unless otherwise stated.)
39. Emerson employs German spellings for the names of Persian poets, derived
from his reading of German translations.
40. Hafiz, Divan, ed. Parviz Natel-Khanlari, (Tehran, 1362/1983), 374, l., 4.
41. Ibn Arabi, Fusus al-hikam, Abu’l ‘Ala ‘Affifi, ed., (Cairo, 1365/946). 2 vols.:
first volume contains the text and the second is the commentary. He also published The
Mystical Philosophy of Muhyid-Din Ibn al-‘Arabi, (Cambridge, 1939).
42. Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, trans. from French
by Ralph Manheim, Bollingen Series XCI (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1969), 319, no. 79.
43. For further information on Avicenna’s influence on Dante see Étienne Gilson,
Dante and Philosophy (New York: Harper and Row, 1963) and Bruno Nardi, Dante e la
Cultura Medievale (Bari: Laterza, 1985).
44. Henry Corbin, Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, trans. from French by Willard
R. Trask (Dallas: University of Dallas, 1980), 22.
45. Frederic Ives Carpenter, Emerson and Asia (New York: Haskell House, 1968), 46.
46. Ibid., 14.
47. Ibid., 43.
48. Ibid., 15.
49. Emerson, “Plato,” in The Representative Men, Works, IV, 50–51.
50. Ibid., 50.
51. Ibid., 65–6.
52. Ibid., 63–4.
53. P., “The Divine Presence in Nature and in the Soul,” The Dial; A Magazine
for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion, vol. I (1841), 58–70. The quotations are taken con-
secutively from 59, 61–62, 66.
54. Sa‘di, Kuliyat, ed. Mazahir Musaffa (Tehran, 1340/1961), 472, line 11.
55. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Encounter of Man and Nature; The Spiritual Crisis of
Modern Man (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968), 95.
116 Parvin Loloi

56. Titus Burckhardt, Mirror of the Intellect, trans. William Stoddart, (Albany, NY:
SUNY Press, 1987), 24.
57. Paradiso, I, 103 in Burkhardt, Mirror, 86.
58. Emerson, “Nature,” Works, III, 161.
59. Carpenter, Emerson and Asia, 176.
60. Emerson, “Poet,” Essays, Second Series, Works, III, 28
61. Ibid., 25.
62. Ibid., 33.
63. Ibid., 165.
64. Henry David Thoreau, The Journals of Henry D. Thoreau, ed. Bradford Torrey and
Francis H. Allen, 14 vols. bound in two, Dover, (1855–61) (New York: Dover Publications,
1962). The quotation is taken from IV, 290.
65. Carpenter, Emerson and Asia, 193.
 5

Emerson on Hafiz and Sa‘di

The Narrative of Love and Wine

Farhang Jahanpour

Although Emerson’s philosophical and religious ideas were mainly influenced by

Hindu sources, the greatest literary influence from the East was that of Persia,
in particular Hafiz and Sa‘di who occupied a special place among Persian poets
who influenced Emerson. It may not be extravagant to claim that, with the
exception of English literature, Persian literature constituted the most important
literary influence on Emerson’s work.1
Emerson’s biographers and critics recognized early on that there was a con-
nection between his literary and mystical works and Persian literature. Emerson’s
son, describing the sources of influence on his father’s writings, wrote: “Another
influence now came in on the side of grace and finish, the Oriental poetry,
in which he took very great interest, especially the poems of Hafiz.”2 An early
critic of Emerson, Joel Benton, discovered the similarity of style in the poems
of Emerson and Persian poets, especially translations of the works of Hafiz. He
concluded that if the translations seem “a little more like Emerson than it does
like Hafiz, the balance is more than preserved by his steeping his own original
quatrain in a little tincture of the wine and spirit of Oriental thought. When
he translated Hafiz, he was probably thinking of his own workmanship; when
he described him, he was simply absorbed in the poet.”3

Emerson’s Encounter with Persian Literature

Many scholars writing on Emerson’s familiarity with Persian literature, however,

have wrongly assumed that his first contact with Persian literature started in 1841

117
118 Farhang Jahanpour

when he read Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall’s translations from Persian poetry.4

However, before immersing himself in von Hammer’s translations, Emerson had
already come across many other translations from Persian poetry and references
to Persian poets. A study of Emerson’s Journals, and especially an examination
of the often neglected literary journals that he borrowed from various Boston
and Harvard libraries, shows that Emerson’s familiarity with Persian poetry goes
back to his youth.5
Emerson’s acquaintance with Persian poetry started in his teen years; when
he read The Asiatick Miscellany, which contained a number of translations from
the poems of Sa‘di, Hafiz, and Jami.6 Later on, through the works of Sir Wil-
liam Jones that he read in 1821 and subsequently, he gained more knowledge
of Persian poetry.7 Emerson’s Journals from 1822 also refer to The Thousand and
One Nights: Or the Arabian Nights Entertainments,8 which provided him with a
treasure-trove of Persian and Arabic tales. In 1836, Emerson read Anquetil Duper-
ron’s Zendavesta, Ouvrage de Zorostre,9 which was the complete translation of the
Zoroastrian scripture Zend-Avesta, excerpts of which Emerson had already read
in 1832. Emerson was clearly interested in Iran’s ancient religion, because a year
later he read The Phoenix: A Collection of Old and Rare Fragments.10 The second
section of this book contained The Oracles of Zoroaster, the Founder of the Persian
Magi. This was prefaced with An Abstract of the Persian Theology of Zoroaster. This
section seems to have particularly interested Emerson, from which he quoted a
few passages in his Journals.11
In 1840 Emerson borrowed all the six volumes of Sir William Jones’s
Works,12 which contained a great deal of information about Oriental literature,
including translations from Hafiz.13 Jones’s Works seem to have further stimu-
lated Emerson’s interest in Persian poetry because, in the following year, he
read Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall’s voluminous anthology of Persian poetry
and his translation of the Divan of Hafiz into German.14 These works marked a
watershed in Emerson’s interest in Persian literature and especially in the Divan
of Hafiz which, as we shall see later, lasted to the end of his life. He also read
Aleksander Chodzko’s Specimen of the Popular Poetry of Persia,15 which is recorded
in his Journals in 1846, and from which he made several quotations.16 In the
same year, he read James Atkinson’s translation of the Shah Nameh (The Book
of Kings) of Firdawsi17 and James Ross’s translation of the Gulistan of Sa‘di.18
Emerson’s reading lists in later years are full of references to Persian poets,
and his Eastern studies between 1845 and 1855 were mainly dominated by
Persian literature. Among the most important books on Persian literature that
Emerson read during these years were: W. R. Alger’s The Poetry of the East;19
James Atkinson’s translation of The Shah-Nameh;20 James Ross’s translation of
Sa‘di’s Gulistan (The Flower Garden);21 the German translation of the Divan
of the celebrated Persian mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi;22 David Shea and Anthony
 Emerson on Hafiz and Sa‘di 119

Troyer’s translations of The Dabistan, or School of Manners;23 and numerous other

English and German translations of the works of Hafiz and Sa‘di.

Emerson’s Writings on Persian Mystical Literature

Apart from numerous references to different Persian poets, Emerson wrote two
long essays and two poems dealing with Persian poetry, and he translated as
many as seven hundred lines of Persian poetry mainly from German sources,
more than half of them from the work of Hafiz. One of his essays is Persian
Poetry, in which he spoke mainly about Hafiz and briefly referred to some other
Persian poets.24 The other is the preface that he supplied to the first American
edition of Sa‘di’s Gulistan translated by Francis Gladwin was published in 1865
by Ticknor and Fields.25 The two poems dealing specifically with Persian poetry
consisted of a long poem under the title of Saadi,26 and Fragments on the Poet
and the Poetic Gift.27
In his essay on “Persian Poetry,” Emerson commences with a general com-
ment on the work of von Hammer-Purgstall as a translator. Of the specimen of
two hundred Persian poets that this German translator had given to the Western
world, Emerson writes:

That for which mainly books exist is communicated in these rich

extracts . . . There are many virtues in books, but the essential value
is the adding of knowledge to our stock by the record of new facts,
and, better by the record of institutions which distribute facts, and
are the formulas which supersede all histories.28

But soon after a general account of Persian poetry, Emerson writes about
Hafiz and shows his appreciation of this great Persian poet. He writes:

Hafiz is the prince of Persian poets, and in his extraordinary gift adds
to some of the attributes of Pindar, Anacreon, Horace, and Burns
the insight of a mystic, that sometimes affords a deeper glance at
Nature than belongs to either of these bards. He accounts all topics
with an easy audacity.29

Then Emerson approvingly translates a few lines from Hafiz that show his
self-reliance, a quality that greatly appealed to Emerson:

I batter the wheel of heaven

When it rolls not rightly by
120 Farhang Jahanpour

I am not one of the snivellers

Who fall thereon and die.30

and:

Alas! Till now I had not known

My guide and Fortune’s guide are one.31

and:

’Tis writ on Paradise’s gate,

“Woe to the dupe that yields to Fate!”32

The other quality that Emerson praises in Hafiz is his frankness and dislike
of hypocrisy. Emerson writes:

Hypocrisy is the perpetual butt of his arrows:

Let us draw the cowl through the brook of wine!33
I will be drunk and down with wine,
Treasure we find in a ruined house!34

In Hafiz, Emerson finds the qualities that are the surest signs of greatness
to him. He says:

That hardihood and self-equality of every sound nature, which result

from the feeling that the spirit in him is entire and as good as the
world, which entitled the poet to speak with authority, and makes
him an object of interest, and his very phrase and syllable significant,
are in Hafiz, and abundantly fortify and ennoble his tone. His was
the fluent mind in which every thought and feeling came readily
to the lips. “Loose the knots of the heart” he says.35

Another admirable quality that Emerson finds in Hafiz is his spiritual

independence and the power of overcoming his surroundings. He writes:

The other merit of Hafiz is his intellectual liberty, which is a cer-

tificate of profound thought . . . Wrong shall not be wrong to Hafiz,
for the name’s sake. A law or statute is to him what a fence is to a
nimble schoolboy,—a temptation to jump.
“We would do nothing but good, else would shame come
to us on the day when the soul must hie hence; and should they
 Emerson on Hafiz and Sa‘di 121

then deny us Paradise, the Houris themselves would forsake that,

and come out to us!”
His complete intellectual emancipation he communicates to
the reader. There is no example of such facility of allusion, such
use of all materials. Nothing is too high, nothing too low, for his
occasion. He fears nothing, he stops for nothing. Love is a level-
ler, and Allah becomes a groom, and heaven a closet, in his daring
hymns to his mistress or his cupbearer. This boundless character is
the right of genius.36

Hafiz’s poetry mirrors forth his mind: the same confusion of high and low,
the clarity of flight and allusion which our colder muses forbid, is habitual to
him. From the plain text:

The Chemist of love

Will this perishing mould,
Were it made out of mire,
Transmute into gold,37

He proceeds to the celebration of his passion; nothing in his religious

or his scientific traditions is too sacred or too remote to afford a token of his
mistress. The moon though she knew his own orbit well enough, but when she
saw the curve on Zuleika’s cheek, she was at a loss:

And since round lines are drawn

My darling’s lips about,
The very moon looks puzzled on,
And hesitates in doubt
If the sweet curve that rounds thy mouth
Be not her true way to the South38

In one of his Journals entries, Emerson used similar words to praise Hafiz. He
wrote:

He is not scared by a name or a religion. He fears nothing. He sees

too far, he sees throughout; such is the only man I wish to see and
to be. The scholar’s courage is as distinct as the soldier’s or statesman’s
and the man who has it not cannot write for me.39

One of the main merits of Persian poets, especially Hafiz, which Emer-
son admires in them is their love of beauty and their joy in life. Hafiz was
122 Farhang Jahanpour

living at one of the darkest periods of Iranian history, when his homeland
was attacked by the ferocious and fanatical armies of Tamerlane (Timur Lang)
and his descendants, and his native town of Shiraz witnessed the slaughter of
thousands of its inhabitants and at least five of its short-lived rulers. But, in
spite of the darkness that surrounded him, Hafiz remained calm and serene
in the depth of his soul and occupied himself with praising the beauty of
nature. Hafiz’s serenity of heart and his boundless search for beauty fascinated
Emerson:

Hafiz praises wine, roses, maidens, boys, birds, morning and music,
to give vent to his immense hilarity and sympathy with every form
of beauty and joy; and lays the emphasis on these to make his scorn
of sanctimony and base prudence . . . Sometimes it is a glance from
the height of thought, as thus:—
“Bring wine: for in the audience-hall of the soul’s independence,
what is sentinel or Sultan? What is the wise man or the intoxicated?”
And sometimes his feast, feasters and world are only one pebble
more in the external vortex and revolution of Fate:—
“I am: what I am
My dust will be again.”40

Finally, one more device of Hafiz which pleased Emerson, was his skill
in mentioning his name in his poems. Emerson describes that “The law of the
ghaselle [ghazal], or shorter ode, requires that the poet inserts his name in the
last stanza. It is itself a test of skill, as this self-naming is not quite easy . . . But
it is easy to Hafiz . . . He tells us ‘The angels in Heaven were lately learning
his last pieces.’ He says, ‘The fishes shed their pearls out of desire and longing
as soon as the ship of Hafiz swims the deep.’ ”41

Out of the East and out of the West, no man understands me;
O, the happier I, who confide to none but the wind!
This morning heard I how the lyre of stars resounded,
Sweeter tones have we heard from Hafiz.
. . . 
‘When Hafiz sings, the angels hearken, and Anaitis, the leader of
the starry host, calls even the Messiah in heaven out to the
dance.’42

Again:

‘O Hafiz, speak not of thy need;

Are not those verses thine?
 Emerson on Hafiz and Sa‘di 123

Then all the poets are agreed,

No man can less repine.’43

He asserts his dignity as bard and inspired man of his people. To the vizier
returning from Mecca he says:—“Boast not rashly, prince of pilgrims, of thy for-
tune. Thou has indeed seen the temple; but I, the Lord of the Temple. Nor has any
man inhaled from the musk-bladder of the merchant, or from the musky morning
wind, that sweet air which I am permitted to breathe every hour of the day.”44
In his essay on Persian Poetry, Emerson concentrated his attention on Hafiz,
but in the Preface to Gulistan he dwelt mainly on Sa‘di, although he still made
frequent references to Hafiz. As its title denotes, Emerson’s poem on Saadi, first
published in The Dial in 1842, also mainly dealt with Sa‘di, whom he chose as
an example of a representative poet. Contrary to the assertion of some critics that
the poem Saadi was merely a device for writing about poets as a whole, there is
plenty of evidence to show that he had the Persian poet in mind when writing
that poem. Not only do many references to “Saadi” correspond with what he
had written about Sa‘di in his Journals,45 he clearly states that it was a portrait
of the Persian poet. Emerson wrote that poem after reading many translations of
the works of Sa‘di. A year after writing it, he read the full text of the Gulistan,
and in a telling passage in the Journals he declared: “In Saadi’s Gulistan I find
many traits which comport with the portrait I drew [in the poem Sa‘di].”46
In Fragments on the Poet and the Poetic Gift, Emerson again concentrated
on Sa‘di (here referred to as Said) and on Hafiz. Both of them were hungry
for truth and beauty and went everywhere searching for it:

There are beggars in Iran and Araby,

Said was hungrier than all;
Hafiz said he was a fly
That came to every festival.47

In this poem Emerson mixes the praise of the two poets together and sometimes
what he says of one is more true of the other. At the beginning of the poem
there are some lines about Hafiz, which definitely apply more to Sa‘di:

He came a pilgrim to the Mosque

On trail of camel and caravan,
Knew every temple and kiosk
Out from Mecca to Isphahan . . .

These lines are hardly true of Hafiz who never visited Mecca and seldom
left his beloved Shiraz, but they can refer to Sa‘di who travelled widely and
made eight pilgrimages to Mecca.
124 Farhang Jahanpour

On the other hand, the following lines attributed to Sa‘di are truer of Hafiz:

Said Saadi, ‘When I stood before

Hassan the camel-driver’s door
I scorned the fame of Timour brave’
Timour, to Hassan, was a slave . . .

When Sa‘di was living, Tamerlane was not even born, but Hafiz’s alleged
encounter with the Tartar ruler is famous. Emerson himself in his essay on
Persian Poetry relates that story:

It is told of Hafiz that, when he had written a compliment to a

handsome youth,—

Take my heart in thy hand, O beautiful boy of Shiraz!

I would give for the mole on thy cheek Samarcand and Buchara!

The verses came to the ears of Timour in his palace. Timour taxed
Hafiz with treating disrespectfully his two cities, to raise and adorn
which he had conquered nations. Hafiz replies, ‘Alas, my lord, if I
had not been so prodigal, I had not been so poor!’ ”48

It is evident that in the poem Fragments on the Poet and the Poetic Gift,
Emerson refers freely to these two poets and his descriptions could be true of
either of them. He writes about Sa‘di:

The Dervish whined to Said,

“Thou didst not tarry while I prayed.”
But Saadi answered,
“Once with manlike love and fear
I gave thee for an hour my ear,
I kept the sun and stars at bay,
And love, for words thy tongue could say.
I cannot sell my heaven again
For all that rattles in thy brain.”

Yet in his Journals, Emerson had praised Hafiz in the same tone: “He is
not scared by a name or a religion. He fears nothing. He sees too far, he sees
throughout; such is the only man I wish to see and to be. The scholar’s courage
is as distinct as the soldier’s or statesman’s and the man who has it not cannot
write for me.”49
Or, again in this poem, Emerson praises Hafiz in similar terms that he had
used to praise Sa‘di in the poem bearing his name as its title:
 Emerson on Hafiz and Sa‘di 125

His music was the south-wind’s sigh,

His lamp, the maiden’s downcast eye,
And ever the spell of beauty came
And turned the drowsy world to flame.
By lake and stream and gleaming hall
And modest copse and the forest hall,
Where’er he went, the magic guide
Kept its place by the poet’s side

Referring to Sa‘di, Emerson wrote in verse what he had written about

him in prose in his Journals. He had noted Sa‘di’s interest in high and low and,
as a result, all people’s interest in him. He wrote: “The human race is interested
in Saadi . . . Saadi is the poet of friendship, of love, of heroism, of self-devotion,
beauty, serenity, and the divine Providence.”50
Apart from the above sources wherein Emerson speaks in detail about
Persian poets there are many other references to them scattered in his Works
and Journals. Emerson often put Hafiz and Shakespeare in the same category.
In one of his poems he wrote of the two poets as teachers who taught and
inspired without preaching:

“A new commandment,” said the smiling Muse,

“I give my darling son, Thou shalt not preach;—”
Luther, Fox, Bohmen, Swedenborg grew pale,
And, in the instant, rosier clouds upbore
Hafiz and Shakespeare with their shining choirs.51

In his poem on The Poet, Emerson speaks about poets in general and does
not specify any by name. But there are certain passages in that poem that in
the light of what he had written elsewhere of Hafiz can be easily distinguished
as referring to him. For example, he writes:

He sowed the sun and moon for seeds . . .

But oh, to see his solar eyes
Like meteors which chose their way
And rived the dark like a new day!
No lazy grazing on all they saw
Each chimney-pot and village picket fence,
But, feeding on magnificence,
They bounded to the horizon’s edge
And searched with the sun’s privilege.52

These lines recall what he had written of Hafiz in his Journals: “Hafiz’s
poetry is marked by nothing more than his habit of playing with all ­magnitudes,
126 Farhang Jahanpour

mocking at them. What is the moon, or the sun’s course or heaven, and the
angels to his darling’s mole or eyebrow?”53 Again, he had written about the
same poet: “He is restless, inquisitive, thousand-eyed, insatiable, and as like a
nightingale intoxicated with his own music; never was the privilege of poetry
more haughtily used.”54
There is another passage in The Poet, which may refer to Hafiz:

He whom God has thus preferred,—

To whom sweet angels ministered,
Saluted him each morn as brother,
And bragged his virtues to each other . . .55

With these lines are to be compared the following prose translations from
Hafiz made by Emerson for the essay on Persian Poetry: “When Hafiz sings, the
angels hearken, and Anaitis, the leader of the starry host, calls even the Messiah
in heaven out to the dance.” And, “I heard the harp of the planet Venus, and it
said in the early morning, I am the disciple of the sweet-voiced Hafiz.”56
There is an entry in the Journals that was written shortly after Emerson
read Hafiz: “Expression is what we want: not knowledge, but vent: we know
enough; but have not leaves and lungs enough for a healthy perspiration and
growth. Hafiz has! . . . ‘Keep the body open,’ is the hygiene precept . . . Large
utterance!”57
Emerson was attracted to Hafiz as soon as he came to know him. The
very first entry about Hafiz is as follows:

Hafiz defies you to show him or put him in a condition inappro-

priate or ignoble. Take all you will, and leave him but a corner of
Nature, a lane, a den, a cowshed . . . he promises to win to that
scorned spot the light of the moon and stars, the love of men, the
smile of beauty, and the homage of art.58

There are further references in the Journals that show other qualities that
Emerson liked in Persian poets, especially Hafiz. One was the inspirational qual-
ity of women. In his second series of Essays there is a striking passage asking:

Was it Hafiz or Firdawsi that said of his Persian Lilla, She was an
elemental force, and astonished me by her amount of life, when I
saw her day after day radiating, every instant, redundant joy and
grace on all around her. She was a solvent powerful to reconcile all
heterogeneous persons into one society: like air or water, an element
of such a great range of affinities, that it combines readily with a
thousand substances. Where she is present, all others will be more
 Emerson on Hafiz and Sa‘di 127

than they are wont. She was a unit and whole, so that whatsoever she
did, became her. She had too much sympathy and desire to please,
than that you could say, her manners were marked with dignity, yet
no princess could surpass her clear and erect demeanour on each
occasion. She did not study the Persian grammar, nor the books of
the seven poets, but all the poems of the seven seemed to be written
upon her. For, though the bias of her nature was not to thought, but
to sympathy, yet was she so perfect in her own nature, as to meet
intellectual persons by the fullness of her heart, warming them by
her sentiments; believing, as she did, that by dealing nobly with all,
all would show themselves noble.59

Another quality that Emerson admired about Hafiz was his disregard of the
material world. He quoted a poem from Hafiz where he says: “Our father Adam
sold Paradise for two kernels of wheat; then blame me not if I hold it dear at
one grapestone.”60 Yet another trait of the Persian poet that Emerson admired
was his love of beauty and his dislike of religious formalism. He quotes Hafiz
approvingly when he addresses the leader of the pilgrims to Mecca that he only
sees the surface and the building while Hafiz sees the Lord of the building: “To
the vizier returning from Mecca he says:—Boast not rashly, prince of pilgrims, of
thy fortune. Thou has indeed seen the temple; but I, the Lord of the Temple.”61
Again, in his Journals, Emerson praised Hafiz’s disdain of literal religion in these
words: “He is not scared by a name or a religion. He fears nothing. He sees
too far, he sees throughout; such is the only man I wish to see and to be. The
scholar’s courage is as distinct as the soldier’s or statesman’s and the man who
has it not cannot write for me.”62
In the notebook called Orientalist are the following passages, mostly tran-
scribed from the Journals during his forties when Emerson became familiar with
German translations of Hafiz:

Hafiz has only just arrived as a competitor to our occidental lyricists,

as the Pasha of Egypt challenged so lately the English men of the turf,
and our theologians left out till now the Bhagavat Geeta [Bhagavad
Gita]. Nothing stops him; he makes the dare-God and dare-devil
experiment; he is not to be scared by a name, or a religion; he fears
nothing, he sees too far, and sees throughout.
Hafiz’s scepticism is only that of a deep intellect: he pays homage
to virtue. Wine stands poetically for all that symbolizes, and not as in
Moore’s verse for Best Port. He who sees the horizon may securely
say what he pleases of any tree of twig between him and it. He takes
his life in his hand, and is ready for a new world . . . ‘Talk not to
me of mosques or of dervishes, God is my witness, I am where he
128 Farhang Jahanpour

dwells.’ Hafiz does not write of wine and love in any mystical sense,
further than that he uses wine as the symbol of intellectual freedom.

In this passage, Emerson makes a very important statement about Hafiz’s

symbolism. Contrary to many who see his use of wine either as a sign of
debauchery or see it purely as a symbol for mystical intoxication, Emerson points
out that above all it is a symbol of “intellectual freedom.” At a time of religious
fanaticism and bigotry when drinking wine could result in harsh penalties, Hafiz
uses wine as a way of transcending religious strictures and expressing his disgust
of hypocrisy and sanctimonious religiosity.
In his Journals for 1846, Emerson wrote: “Hafiz, whom I at first thought
of a cross of Anacreon and Horace, I find now to have the best blood of Pindar
also in his verses.” 63

Emerson’s Translations from Hafiz

Emerson translated about 700 lines of Persian poetry, about half are transla-
tions from the poems of Hafiz. Apart from Hafiz who has the lion’s share
of Emerson’s translations, the following poets furnished the sources of Emer-
son’s other translations: Fereideddin [Farid al-Din] Attar (54 lines), Sa‘di (34
lines), Nimatollah [Ni’matullah] of Kuhestan (34 lines), Ibn Jamin [Ibn Yamin]
(22 lines), Nizami (21 lines), Enweri [Anvari] (20 lines), Kermani (20 lines),
Omar Chiam [Khayyam] (12 lines); and Adschedi [Asjudi], Feizi, Dschami [Jami]
and Dscheladdin [Jalaluddin] Rumi (4 lines each).64 As von Hammer-Purgstall’s
German translations of Persian poetry provided the origins for most of Emer-
son’s translations he adopts the German spelling of Persian names. For example,
he writes Medschnun for Majnun, Dscheladdin for Jalaluddin and Dschami for
Jami.
To Emerson should, doubtless, go the credit for being one of the first
translators of some quatrains from the Ruba‘iyyat of Omar Khayyam in the
United States, and also for introducing the Persian Ruba‘i (quatrain) into English.
His translations of the Ruba‘iyyat preceded those of Fitzgerald by many years.
To him also goes the distinction of prophesying that Omar Khayyam deserved
and would become better known by Western readers. Writing in the Atlantic
Monthly for April 1858, Emerson pointed out: “The seven masters of Persian
Parnassus, Firdousi, Enweri, Nisami, Dschelaleddin, Saadi, Hafiz and Dschami,
have ceased to be empty names; and others, like Fereideddin Attar, and Omar
Chiam, promise to rise in Western estimation.”65
The first category of his translations consists of attempts to render a literal
translation of the original. In his translations of Hafiz, Emerson sometimes pro-
 Emerson on Hafiz and Sa‘di 129

duced the verbal translation and later on improved upon his original rendition.
One example is the translation of a few lines of the following ghazal:

See, the chemist of love

Will the dust of the body
Convert into gold
Were it never so leaden.
O Hafiz, do churls Know the worth of great pearls?
Give the high-prized stone
Only to sacred friends alone.

When he came to quote this poem in his essay on Persian Poetry, this is
how he rendered it:

The chemist of love

Will this perishing mould
Were it made out of mire,
Transmute into gold.
Thou foolish Hafiz! Say, do churls
Know the worth of Oman’s pearls?
Give the gem which dims the moon
To the noblest or to none.66

Sometimes Emerson tried to produce exact translations of the original

poems, but misunderstood the meaning of the German translations, and as a result
changed the meaning of ideas expressed in the original poems. For example, it is
a familiar sentiment in the poems of both Hafiz and Omar Khayyam that one
should treasure the moment, as when one leaves this world one will not come
back. Emerson, translating a line expressing this idea, wrote: “When thou goest,
come not back,” which has a completely different meaning.
The second category of translations includes selections from different
poems, mixed together to form a single poem. An example of this category is
a poem which Emerson called Of Passionate Abandonment, and which is formed
out of two odes of Hafiz:

I know this perilous love-lane

And whither the traveller leads,
Yet my fancy the sweet scent of
Thy tangled tresses feeds.
In the midnight of thy locks,
I renounce the day;
130 Farhang Jahanpour

In the ring of thy rose-lips

My heart forgets to pray.67

Sometimes, we come across some translations that have more than the Ger-
man text for a source. It is evident that Emerson has made use of the notes of
von Hammer’s translations or has been acquainted with some English versions of
those poems. For example, in the following translation, From Hafiz, Emerson has
exactly rendered the Persian original that had been distorted in the German text:

I said to heaven that glowed above,

O hide yon sun-filled zone,
Hide all the start you boast;
For in the world of love
And estimation true,
The heaped-up harvest of the moon
Is worth one barley-corn at most,
The Pleiads’s sheaf but two.

In fact, E. B. Cowell had already translated that particular ghazal of Hafiz and
Emerson might have read it.68
The third category of selections includes poems that can hardly be called
translations. In this group belong poems that have some Persian source, but
Emerson has elaborated on the translation and many lines have been added to
the original. In this category may be included the poems that Emerson wrote
about Hafiz, but which were inspired by some of the poems by Hafiz. The
similarity is so striking that it is difficult to decide whether to classify them as
translations or imitations. For instance, among the quatrains we come across a
poem entitled Hafiz:

Her passions the shy violet

From Hafiz never hides;
Love longings of the raptured bird
The bird to him confides

There is a poem by Hafiz translated by Emerson, which probably suggests

the above lines:

By breath of beds of roses drawn,

I found the grove in the morning pure,
In the concert of the nightingale
My drunken brain to cure.
 Emerson on Hafiz and Sa‘di 131

With unrelated glance

I looked the rose in the eye;
The rose in the hour of gleaming
Flamed like a lamp hard-by.

She was of her beauty proud,

And prouder of her youth,
The while unto her flaming heart
The bulbul gave his truth.

The sweet narcissus closed

Its eye, with passion pressed,
The tulips out of envy burned
Moles in their scarlet breast.

The lilies white prolonged

Their sworded tongue to the smell;
The clustering anemones
Their pretty secrets tell.69

Echoes of Hafiz’s Poems in Emerson’s Verse

Through the frequent reading of the poems of Hafiz and other Persian poets,
Emerson’s poems were influenced by them, and in some of his most famous
poems the influence is too clear to be missed. The influence is manifest in
several ways: in the similarity of style and the use of imagery, the correspon-
dence of thoughts and feelings, and the use of the same material. Emerson’s
style has been described as being original among the Western writers. His
familiarity with and imitation of Persian poetry might provide some of the
answers for the unique qualities of Emerson’s verse. Persian poetry served to
enrich the stone of his imagery and to introduce many new forms of expres-
sion to him, but it is not only in Emerson’s use of imagery and language that
one can discover the influence of Persian poetry. Many of his ideas were also
borrowed from the same source.
One of the poems that was inspired, in part at least, from his reading of
Persian poetry is the poem Days. This poem is short and may be quoted entirely:

Daughter of Time, the hypocritic Days,

Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
And marching single in an endless file,
132 Farhang Jahanpour

Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.

To each they offer gifts after his will,
Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.
I, in my pleachèd garden, watched the pomp,
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
Turned and departed silent. I, too late,
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.

There is an entry in the Journals for May 24, 1847, as follows: “The days
come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party,
but they say nothing, and if we do not see the gifts they bring they carry them
as silently away.”70 In a note, Edward Emerson has observed that this sentence
was later embodied in the poem Days.71 At the time of expressing these senti-
ments, Emerson was reading Persian poetry and this sentiment is expressed often
in the poems of Hafiz and Omar Khayyam. The interesting point is that the
second entry in Journals for May 24, 1847, is a translation of a ghazal by Hafiz,
in which occur the following lines:

Surely I have no treasure,

Yet am I richly satisfied;
God has given that to the Shah,
And this to the beggar.

Apart from expressing a similar idea to that of Days, these lines clearly
suggest the line “To each they offer gifts after his will.” In the next line of the
poem Days, Emerson makes use of a trick of Hafiz, which he had remarked
upon in his essay on Persian Poetry, namely Hafiz’s habit of “playing with mag-
nitudes:” “Bread, kingdoms, stars and sky that holds them all.”
The term “barefoot dervishes” clearly echoes the use of the term in some
Persian poems, which also appear in many of Emerson’s translations of them.
But, most important of all, the moral and general idea of the poem is basically
Oriental and several poems of Hafiz contain the same thought.
Another poem of Emerson that has a parallel in his translations of Persian
poetry is the poem entitled “To J. W.” This poem bears a striking resemblance to
a ghazal of Hafiz that Emerson translated in 1847. In order to see the similarity
between the two poems, I quote both poems below:

Set not thy foot on graves;

Hear what wine and roses say;
The mountain chase, the summer waves,
The crowded town, thy feet may well delay.
 Emerson on Hafiz and Sa‘di 133

Set not thy foot on graves;

Nor seek to unwind the shroud
Which charitable time
And nature have allowed
To wrap the errors of a sage sublime.

Set not thy foot on graves;

Care not to strip the dead
Of his sad ornament;
His myrrh, and wine, and rings,
His sheet of lead,
And trophies buried;
Go get them where he earned them when alive,
As resolutely dig or dive.

Life is too short to waste

The critic bite or cynic bark,
Quarrel, or reprimand;
’Twill soon be dark;
Up! mind thine own aim, and
God speed the mark.

The translation of the poem by Hafiz that Emerson entitled Ghaselle: From the
Persian of Hafiz II is as follows:

Of Paradise, O hermit wise,

Let us renounce the thought.
Of old therein our names of sin
Allah recorded not.

Who dear to God on earthly sod

No corn-grain plants,
The same is glad that life is had,
Though corn he wants.

Thy mind the mosque and cool kiosk,

Spare fast, and orisons;
Mine me allows the drink-house,
And sweet chase of the nuns.

O just fakeer, with brow austere,

Forbid me not the vine;
134 Farhang Jahanpour

On the first day, poor Hafiz clay

Was kneaded up with wine.

He is no dervise, Heaven slights his service,

Who shall refuse
There in the banquet, to pawn his blanket
For Schiraz’s juice.

Who his friend’s shirt, or hem of his shirt,

Shall spare to pledge,
To him Eden’s bliss and Angel’s kiss
Shall want their edge.

Up, Hafiz; grace from high God’s face

Beams on thee pure;
Shy then not hell, and trust thou well,

Heaven is secure.

These two poems have many points in common. Both of them forbid
the reader to put his mind on the next life, and teach him to enjoy God’s
bounties in the here-and-now rather than in the hereafter. Both offer wine and
roses as sources of pleasure in life, and both end on the optimistic note that a
gracious God will overlook the faults of men and will bestow salvation. Apart
from similarities in contents, there are some similarities in expression as well.
“Sage sublime” in the one, and “hermit wise” in the other; in both of them
the closing apostrophe begins with the word ‘Up.’
The third stanza of Ghaselle, with its reference to a frequent claim of Hafiz
that he had been predestined towards wine from birth may also have provided
the inspiration for the following lines from May-Day:

Poets praise that hidden wine

Hid in milk we drew
At the barrier of Time,
When our life was new.
We had eaten fairy fruit,
We were quick from head to foot,
All the forms we looked on shone
As with diamond dews thereon.

Another poem by Emerson, which even more clearly reflects Emerson’s

debt to Hafiz, is the famous poem called Bacchus. Most commentators have readily
 Emerson on Hafiz and Sa‘di 135

admitted that this poem was inspired by Persian sources. Emerson himself was
aware of the fact and thought Bacchus might be taken as a translation of a poem
by Hafiz. In July 1846, in a letter to Elizabeth Hoar he wrote that he had been
working on some poems that he felt impatient to show her, “especially some
verses called Bacchus . . . not, however, translated from Hafiz.” But although he
rightly points out that the poem is not a direct translation of Hafiz, it shows
great resemblance to another translation that he made of a famous poem of
Hafiz, called “Saqi-Namah.” Let us first quote Emerson’s poem:

Bring me wine, but wine which never grew

In the belly of the grape,
Or grew on vine whose tap-roots, reaching through
Under the Andes to the Cape,
Suffer’d no savour of the earth to ’scape.

Let its grapes the morn salute

From a nocturnal root,
Which feels the acrid juice
Of Styx and Erebus;
And turns the woe of Night,
By its own craft, to a more rich delight.

We buy ashes for bread;

We buy diluted wine;
Give me of the true,
Whose ample leaves and tendrils curl’d
Among the silver hills of heaven
Draw everlasting dew;
Wine of wine,
Blood of the world,
Form of forms, and mould of statures,
That I intoxicated,
And by the draught assimilated,
May float at pleasure through all natures;
The bird-language rightly spell,
And that which roses say so well:

Wine that is shed

Like the torrents of the sun
Up the horizon walls,
Or like the Atlantic streams, which run
When the South Sea calls.
136 Farhang Jahanpour

Water and bread,

Food which needs no transmuting,
Rainbow-flowering, wisdom-fruiting,
Wine which is already man,
Food which teach and reason can.

Wine which Music is,—

Music and wine are one,—
That I, drinking this,
Shall hear far Chaos talk with me;
Kings unborn shall walk with me;
And the poor grass shall plot and plan
What it will do when it is man.
Quicken’d so, will I unlock
Every crypt of every rock.
I thank the joyful juice
For all I know;
Winds of remembering
Of the ancient being blow,
And seeming-solid walls of use
Open and flow.

Pour, Bacchus! the remembering wine;

Retrieve the loss of me and mine!
Vine for vine be antidote,
And the grape requite the lote!
Haste to cure the old despair;
Reason in Nature’s lotus drench’d—
The memory of ages quench’d—
Give them again to shine;
Let wine repair what this undid;
And where the infection slid,
A dazzling memory revive;
Refresh the faded tints,
Recut the agèd prints,
And write my old adventures with the pen
Which on the first day drew,
Upon the tablets blue,
The dancing Pleiads and eternal men.

If one compares the above poem with Emerson’s translation of Saqi-Nameh

by Hafiz one will see many common features between the two:
 Emerson on Hafiz and Sa‘di 137

Butler, fetch the ruby wine,

Which with sudden greatness fills us;
Pour for me who in my spirit
Fail in courage and performance;
Bring the philosophic stone,
Karun’s treasure, Noah’s life;
Haste, that by thy means I open
All the doors of luck and life.
Bring me, boy, the fire-water
Zoroaster sought in dust.
To Hafiz revelling ‘tis allowed
To pray to Matter and to Fire.
Bring the wine of Jamschid’s glass
That shone, ere time was, in the Néant.

Give it me, that through its virtue

I, as Jamschid, see through worlds.
Wisely said the Kaiser Jamschid,
This world’s not worth a barleycorn.
Bring me, boy, the nectar cup,
Since it leads to Paradise.
Flute and lyre lordly speak,
Lees of wine outvalue crowns.
Hither bring the veiled beauty
Who in ill-famed houses sits:
Lead her forth: my honest name
Freely barter I for wine.
Bring me, boy, the fire-water,
Drinks the lion—the woods burn.
Give it me, that I storm heaven,
Tear the net from the arch-wolf.
Wine, wherewith the Houris teach
Angels the ways of Paradise.
On the glowing coals I’ll set it,
And therewith my brain perfume.
Bring me wine, through whose effulgence
Jam and Chosroes yielded light:
Wine, that to the flute I sing
Where is Jam, and where is Kauss.

Bring the blessing of old times;

Bless the old departed Shahs;
138 Farhang Jahanpour

Bring it me, the Shah of hearts.

Bring me wine to wash me clean,
Of the weather-stains of care,
See the countenance of luck.
While I dwell in spirit-gardens,
Wherefore sit I shackled here?
Lo, this mirror shows me all.
Drunk, I speak of purity,
Beggar, I of lordship speak.
When Hafiz in his revel sings,
Shouteth Sohra in her sphere.

Fear the changes of a day:

Bring wine which increases life,
Since the world is all untrue,
Let the trumpets thee remind
How the crown of Kobad vanished.
Be not certain of the world;
’Twill not spare to shed thy blood.
Desperate of the world’s affair,
Came I running to the wine-house.
Give me wine which maketh glad,
That I may my steed bestride,
Through the course career with Rustem,
Gallop to my heart’s content.
Give me, boy, the ruby cup
Which unlocks the heart with wine,
That I reason quite renounce,
And plant banners on the worlds.
Let us make our glasses kiss,
Let us quench the sorrow-cinders:
To-day let us drink together.
Whoso has a banquet dressed,
Is with glad mind satisfied,
’Scaping from the snares of Dews.

Alas for youth! ’tis gone in wind,—

Happy he who spent it well.
Give me wine, that I o’erleap
Both worlds at a single spring,
Stole at dawn from glowing spheres
Call of Houris to mine ear;
 Emerson on Hafiz and Sa‘di 139

“O happy bird! delicious soul!

Spread thy pinion, break the cage;
Sit on the roof of the seven domes,
Where the spirit takes repose.”
In the time of Bisurdschimihr,
Menutscheher’s beauty shined,
On the beaker of Nushirvan,
Wrote they once in eider times,
“Hear the Counsel, learn from us
Sample of the course of things;
Earth, it is a place of sorrow,
Scanty joys are here below,
Who has nothing, has no sorrow.”

Where is Jam, and where his cup?

Solomon, and his mirror where?
Which of the wise masters knows
What time Kauss and Jam existed?
When those heroes left this world,
Left they nothing but their names.
Bind thy heart not to the earth,
When thou goest, come not back.
Fools squander on the world their hearts.
League with it, is feud with heaven;
Never gives it what thou wishest.

A cup of wine imparts the sight

Of the five heaven-domes with nine steps:
Whoso can himself renounce,
Without support shall walk thereon.
Who discreet is, is not wise.
Give me, boy, the Kaiser cup,
Which rejoices heart and soul;
Under type of wine and cup
Signify we purest love.
Youth like lightning disappears,
Life goes by us as the wind:
Leave the dwelling with six doors,
And the serpent with nine heads;
Life and silver spend thou freely,
If thou honorest the soul.
Haste into the other life;
140 Farhang Jahanpour

All is nought save God alone.

Give me, boy, this toy of dæmons.
When the cup of Jam was lost,
Him availed the world no more.
Fetch the wine-glass made of ice,
Wake the torpid heart with wine.
Every clod of loam below us
Is a skull of Alexander;
Oceans are the blood of princes;
Desert sands the dust of beauties.
More than one Darius was there
Who the whole world overcame;
But since these gave up the ghost,
Thinkest thou they never were?
Boy, go from me to the Shah,
Say to him: Shah crowned as Jam,
Win thou first the poor man’s heart,
Then the glass; so know the world.
Empty sorrows from the earth
Canst thou drive away with wine.
Now in thy throne’s recent beauty,
In the flowing tide of power,
Moon of fortune, mighty king,
Whose tiara sheddeth lustre,
Peace secure to fish and fowl,
Heart and eye-sparkle to saints;
Shoreless is the sea of praise,—
I content me with a prayer.
From Nisami’s poet-works,
Highest ornament of speech,
Here a verse will I recite,
Verse as beautiful as pearls.
“More kingdoms wait thy diadem,
Than are known to thee by name;
May the sovran destiny
Grant a victory every morn!”72

Apart from the general tone of the two poems, which is very similar,
both of them celebrate wine and both of them refer to it as something different
from the “juice of the grape.” Contrary to the normal tradition of Bacchanalian
poems, which celebrate the physical pleasures derived from drinking and getting
 Emerson on Hafiz and Sa‘di 141

drunk, both Hafiz and Emerson refer to wine as a metaphor for spiritual and
metaphysical intoxication that takes man to levels beyond mere rationality. It is a
juice, which in Hafiz’s words with “sudden greatness fills us,” or “Bring me, boy,
the nectar cup, Since it leads to Paradise;” and in Emerson’s words “May float
at pleasure through all natures; The bird-language rightly spell, And that which
roses say so well.” To Hafiz, wine produces a state “That shone, ere time was, in
the Néant,” or “Bring the blessing of old times, Bless the old departed Shahs;”
while Emerson “Shall hear far Chaos talk with me, Kings unborn shall walk with
me, And the poor grass shall plot and plan, What it will do when it is man.”
In the vocabulary of the Sufis, butler, wine, cup-bearer, and drunk have
symbolic meanings. For instance, cup-bearer is regarded as the spiritual guide
that reveals spiritual secrets. Similarly, by wine is meant the fire of the love
of God, which produces intellectual liberation and spiritual ecstasy.73 Tavern is
a retreat where one communicates with the Beloved, and a drunkard is one
who has gone beyond the realm of reason and has been initiated into divine
mysteries. In Bacchus, Emerson imitates Hafiz, and speaks of wine as something
which takes him out of himself and beyond time and space: “Pour, Bacchus!
the remembering wine; Retrieve the loss of me and mine!” With the help of
wine he wishes to unlock “every crypt of every rock.” There are also many
similarities of diction in the two poems, and words like heaven, world, unlock,
quench, etc., are used in both of them.
After Bacchus, Emerson wrote another poem called Fragmentary Bachhus,
which again reflects the influence of Hafiz. The Fragmentary Bachhus, as appeared
in the centenary edition, is as follows:

Pour the wine, pour the wine . . .

It can cancel bulk and time;
Crowds and condenses
Into a drop a tun . . .
On a brown grapestone
The wheels of nature turn;
Out of it the fury comes
Wherewith the spondyls burn.
And because a drop of the Vine
Is creation’s heart
Wash with wine those eyes of thine;
Nothing is hid, nor whole nor part.
Wine is translated wit,
Wine is the day of day
Wine from the veiled secret
Tear the veil away.
142 Farhang Jahanpour

This poem should be compared with some lines from a poem by Hafiz
that Emerson translated in his essay on Persian Poetry:

The Builder of heaven

Hath sundered the earth,
So that no footway
Leads out of it forth.

On turnpikes of wonder
wine leads the mind forth,
Straight, sidewise, and upward,
West, southward, and north.

Stands the vault adamantine

Until the Doomsday;
The wine-cup shall ferry
Thee o’er it away.

The likeness of imagery between “the wheels of nature” and the “turnpikes
of wonder” is too clear to miss. To Emerson, “Wine from the veiled secret, Tear
the veil away,” and to Hafiz “wine leads the mind forth, Straight, sidewise, and
upward, West, southward, and north.” Also one might add to the above source
the following from the essay on Persian Poetry, where Emerson contends that
Hafiz thinks that wine

“can snatch from the deeply hidden lot the veil that covers it.
To be wiser the dull brain earnestly throbs
Bring bands of wine for the stupid head.”74

There is another poem of Hafiz translated by Emerson, which has influ-

enced two of his own poems. The lines from Hafiz are as follows:

If my darling should depart,

And search the skies for prouder friends,
God forbid my angry heart
In other love should seek amends.

When the blue horizon’s hoop

Me a little pinches here,
Instant to my grave I stoop,
And go find thee in the sphere.
 Emerson on Hafiz and Sa‘di 143

The poems of Emerson, which show some resemblance to the above lines are
as follows:

Hermione

(The love-sick Arab is advised by the elements . . .)

Courage! we are thine allies,
And with this hint be wise,—
The chains of kind
The distant bind;
Deed thou doest she must do,
Above her will, be true;
And, in her strict resort
To winds and waterfalls
And autumn’s sunlit festivals,
To music, and to music’s thought,
Inextricably bound,
She shall find thee, and be found.
Follow not her flying feet;
Come to us herself to meet.

The other poem is

Give All to Love:

(The lover is urged to be . . .)

Free as an Arab
Of thy beloved.
Cling with life to the maid;
But when the surprise,
Vague shadow of surmise,
Flits across her bosom young
Of a joy apart from thee,
Free be she, fancy-free,
Do not thou detain a hem,
Nor the palest rose she flung
From her summer diadem.

Though thou loved her as thyself,

As a self of purer clay,
Tho’ her parting dims the day,
Stealing grace from all alive,
144 Farhang Jahanpour

Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.

“Blue horizon’s hoop” used in the poem of Hafiz was a phrase that Emerson
liked and used it on several occasions. In Monadnoc he writes:

Seen happy from afar,

Above the horizon’s hoop.

In his essay on Intellect, Emerson wrote: “I am caught up by a strong wind

and so far in one direction that I am out of the hoop of your horizon.”
There is yet another translation from Hafiz that seems to have inspired
one of Emerson’s poems.

From Hafiz:

Oft have I said, do not stray from myself.

I am a kind of parrot; the mirror is holden to me;
What the eternal says, I stammering say again.
Give me what you will; I eat thistles as roses,
And according to my food I grow and give.
Scorn me not, but know I have the pearl
And am only seeking one to receive it.

The above poem should be compared with Mithradates by Emerson:

. . . 
Give me agates for my meat;
Give me cantharides to eat;
From air and ocean bring me foods,
From all zones and altitudes;—
. . . 
Too long shut in strait and few,
Thinly dieted on dew,
I will use the world, and sift it,
To a thousand humors shift it,
As you spin a cherry.
. . . 
Hither! take me, use me, fill me,
Vein and artery, though ye kill me!
God I will not be an owl,
But sun me in the Capitol.
 Emerson on Hafiz and Sa‘di 145

One can find many other examples of similarities between the poems of Hafiz
and Emerson, but the above examples are sufficient to show the degree of
Emerson’s attachment to Hafiz’s poetry. His most active period of writing poetry
coincided with the period that he was studying Persian poets. His use of the
images that he found in the poems of Hafiz, his deliberate imitation of Persian
models, and the use of the same material are so intricately bound with his own
poems that the influence is to be felt rather than proved. He was very fond of
short sentences—lustres he called them—which he found in the poems of Hafiz,
and he used them in a modified form in his own poems.
Joel Benton, one of the first scholars to make an intense study of Emer-
son’s poetry, saw the relationship between Emerson’s poems and those of Persian
poets, especially Hafiz. He remarked:

The kinship of the mintage is, in some aspects, curious. Shall we

say on account of this homogeneity that the Oriental is but another
Yankee? Or is it that the Yankee is merely the Oriental moved further
West? At any rate, what Hafiz address to himself, and what Emerson
says of him are wondrously alike in mode, texture and tune.75

But there is no more eloquent testimony to Emerson’s interest in Persian

poetry than his own words in the Journals, where he declared:

I suppose every one has favorite topics, which make a sort of museum
or privileged closet of whimsies in his mind, and which he thinks
is a kind of aristocracy to know about. Thus, I like to know about
lions, diamonds, wine, beauty and Martial and Hafiz.76

Notes

 1. For a fuller study of the influence of Hafiz on Emerson’s work, see Farhang
Jahanpour’s MA thesis Oriental Influences on the Work of Ralph Waldo Emerson (University
of Hull, June 1965). Also see: John Yohannan, The Persian Poet Hafiz in England and
America (MA thesis, Columbia University, 1939). For detailed studies of Eastern influ-
ences on Emerson see: F. I. Carpenter, Emerson and Asia (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1930); Arthur Christy, The Orient in American Transcendentalism (New York: Octagon
Books, 1963); John D. Yohannan, Persian Poetry in England and America: A Two Hundred
Year History (New York: Caravan Books, 1977).
  2. Edward Waldo Emerson, Emerson in Concord (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889),
31.
 3. Joel E. Benton, Emerson as a Poet (New York: M. L. Holbrook, 1883), 29.
 4. Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Der Divan von Mohammed Schemseddin Hafis
(Stuttgart and Tubingen, 1812), 2 vols. Also Geschichte der Schonen Redekunste Persien, mit
einer Blutenlese aus Zweihundert Persischen Dichtern (Wien, 1818).
146 Farhang Jahanpour

 5. In order to compile a full list of the books and articles that Emerson read
from his youth onwards, his Works, Letters, and particularly Journals that occasionally made
reference to the books that he was reading at the time are most helpful. There have been
various attempts to provide a complete list of Emerson’s readings. These include: Kenneth
Walter Cameron, Emerson’s Early Reading List (1819–1824) (New York: New York Public
Library, 1951) reprinted in Emerson Society Quarterly, no. 28 (1962); Indian Superstition,
edited with a Dissertation on Emerson’s Orientalism at Harvard (New York: Cayuga, 1954); and
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Reading (Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1962). Also see Jackson R.
Bryer and Robert A Rees, A Checklist of Emerson Criticism (1951–1961), with a Detailed
Index. Bibliographical Supplement: Emerson. Fragment from Eight American Authors, p. 424–28,
“Emerson Society Quarterly,” no. 37 (IV Quarter 1964). Misc. notes found with A Check-
list of Emerson Criticism (1951–1961). These works, however, do not provide a full list of
all Emerson’s readings. Cameron’s book takes the list of Emerson’s readings up to 1924,
while the second and the third sources only provide a list of the books that Emerson
borrowed from three libraries in Boston. There are a large number of books and articles
on Oriental and Persian issues referred to in Emerson’s Journals, Works, Letters, and The
Dial, which have not been included in the above sources. Many of Emerson’s friends,
such as Amos Bronson Alcott and Henry David Thoreau, also possessed collections of
Oriental books and they exchanged these books among them. Various volumes of “The
Edinburgh Review” that Emerson borrowed also provided a rich source of material on
oriental subjects. Indeed, a study of the volumes of “The Edinburgh Review” that Emer-
son borrowed leads one to assume that articles on Oriental topics seemed to have formed
the main attraction to Emerson, as nearly all the editions of the Review that he borrowed
contained some articles on Oriental subjects. A study of all these sources shows that his
familiarity with Persian literature started much earlier than some scholars have assumed.
 6. Francis Gladwin, ed., The Asiatick Miscellany, containing of Original Productions,
Translations, Fugitive Pieces, etc., 2 volumes, (Calcutta: Daniel Stuart, 1785–86). Emerson
used volume one only, which contained some Indian hymns translated by Sir William
Jones, notably the “Hymn to Narayena,” as well as translations from the works of Sa‘di,
Hafiz and Jami. See Kenneth W. Camerson’s Emerson’s Early Reading List 1819–1824 (New
York 1951, 4 and 9). For a complete list of Emerson’s Oriental readings see Farhang
Jahanpour, 311–46. For a list of periodicals with articles on Eastern topics that he read,
see Ibid., 347–75.
 7. In 1821 Emerson read John Shore Teignmouth’s Memoirs of the Life, Writings,
and Correspondence of Sir William Jones (London: John Harchard, 1896). The book dealt
with the life and works of Sir William Jones and provided samples of his translations
from Oriental poetry. See Emerson, Journals, I, 82.
  8. Emerson, Journals, I, 204. It is not clear which edition of The Thousand and One
Nights he read, but it could be Edward Forester’s translation (London, 1802)
  9. Anquetil Duperron, Zendavesta, Ouvrage de Zorostre, 3 vols. (Paris: Tilliard, 1771).
Emerson borrowed two volumes from Boston Athenaeum Library. See K. W. Cameron’s
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Reading (New York, 1951), 54.
10. The Phoenix: A Collection of Old and Rare Fragments: viz. the Morals of Confucius,
the Chinese philosopher; the Oracles of Zoroaster, the founder of the religion of the Persian magi;
Sanchoniathos’s History of the creation; the Voyages of Hanno round the coast of Africa, five hundred
years before Christ; King Hiempsals’ History of the African settlements, translated from the Punic
books; and the choice sayings of Publius Syrus. (New York: W. Gowan, 1835).
 Emerson on Hafiz and Sa‘di 147

11. See Emerson, Journals, IV, 254.

12. Sir William Jones, Works (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1799).
13. Emerson borrowed the Works from Boston Athenaeum Library. See K. W.
Cameron’s Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Reading (New York, 1951), 42.
14. Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Der Divan von Mohammed Schemseddin Hafis,
also Geschichte der Schonen Redekunste Persien, mit einer Blutenlese aus Zweihundert Persischen
Dichtern.
15. Aleksander Chodzko, Specimen of the Popular Poetry of Persia (London, 1842).
16. For Emerson’s quotations from this book see The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emer-
son with Annotations, ed. E. W. Emerson and W. E. Forbes, 10 vols., (Boston, 1909–1914),
VII, 153, 280, 291.
17. The Shah Nameh of the Persian Poet Firdausi, trans. and abridged by James
Atkinson (London, 1832).
18. Sa‘di, The Gulistan or Flower Garden, trans. James Ross from the Persian Text
of Gentius, with an Essay on Sadi (London: Richardson, 1923).
19. William Rousenville Alger, The Poetry of the East, 2 vols. (Boston: Whittemore,
Niles and Hall, 1856). In a letter to Alger on 18 October 1856, Emerson acknowledges
the receipt of the book and adds that he was very pleased to read it. See Stanley T.
Williams, “Unpublished Letters of Emerson,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology,
XXVI, 483–84.
20. James Atkinson’s translation of The Shah Nameh of the Persian Poet Firdausi, trans.
and abridged by James Wilkinson (London: Oriental Translation Fund, 1832). Emerson
borrowed this book from Harvard College Library on September 2, 1846. See Carpenter,
Emerson and Asia, 48 and 72. This was the best translation of the Shah-Nameh, from which
Emerson made a number of quotations.
21. Emerson borrowed this book from Harvard College Library on 18 November
1846. See Carpenter, Emerson and Asia, 48 and 102.
22. Jalal-Ad-Din, Auswahl aus den Diwanen des grossten mystischen Dichters Persiens
Mewlana Dschalaleddin Rumi aus dem Persischen mit beigefugten original—texte und erlatenrn-
den Armerkungen von Vicenz von Rosenweig (Vienna, 1836). This book was borrowed by
Emerson from Boston Athenaeum Library on 4 February 1861. See Carpenter, Emerson
and Asia, 32, 82.
23. David Shea and Anthony Troyer, The Dabistan, or School of Manners (Paris:
Oriental Translation Fund, 1843). See Journals, X, 305.
24. R. W. Emerson, Complete Works, ed. with a biographical introduction and notes
by E. W. Emerson, 12 vols., (Boston: Centenary Edition, 1903–04) VIII, 236–65. All
ubsequent quotations from this essay are taken from this source. This essay was first
s­
published in “The Atlantic Monthly” in 1858.
25. Musle-Huddeen Sheik Saadi, The Gulistan or Rose Garden, trans. from the origi-
nal by Francis Gladwin, with preface by R. W. Emerson (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865).
26. The Dial, 1842. When quoting passages from Emerson, the spelling that he
used to refer to Persian poets is retained.
27. Emerson wrote the first part of “Fragments on the Poet and the Poetic Gift”
in 1845, published in The Poems (Boston 1847, dated 25 December 1846).
28. Emerson, Works, 237.
29. Ibid., 244.
30. Ibid.
148 Farhang Jahanpour

31. Ibid., 245

32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., 248.
34. Ibid., 246.
35. Ibid., 247.
36. Ibid., 248–49.
37. Ibid., 259.
38. Ibid.
39. Emerson, Journals, 1847; quoted in Works, VIII, 417.
40. Emerson, Works, 249–50.
41. Ibid., 252.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., 254.
44. Ibid.
45. For a study of Emerson’s views regarding Sa‘di, see F. Jahanpour, Oriental
Influences, 180–234.
46. Emerson, Journals, VI, 463.
47. Emerson, Works, 390–310–320.
48. Emerson, Works, VIII, 251.
49. Emerson, Journals, 1847, quoted in Works, VIII, 417.
50. Emerson, Journals, 562.
51. Emerson, Works, IX, 297.
52. Emerson, Works, IX, 310.
53. Emerson, Journals, X, 167.
54. Emerson, Works, VIII, 417.
55. Ibid., IX, 316.
56. Ibid., VIII, 253.
57. Emerson, Journals, VII, 279.
58. Ibid., V, 562.
59. Emerson, Essays, Essay 16 on “Manners.”
60. Emerson, Journals, VIII, 244.
61. See Emerson’s essay on Persian Poetry, Works, VIII, 236–65.
62. Emerson, Journals, 1847; quoted in Works, VIII, 417.
63. Emerson, Journals, 418.
64. These translations appear in different places. Some of them were quoted in
Emerson’s Works and Journals. For the translations see: Poems (Boston, 1847), 209–18; The
Liberty Bell, by Friends of Freedom (Boston, 1851), 78–81 and 156–57; Works (Essay on
Worship), VI, 234; Works (Essay on Persian Poetry), VIII, 237–65; Works, IX, 298–305; and
Journals, VII, 181; VII, 277–78; VIII, 542; IX, 75; IX, 538–39; IX, 544–45.
65. Reprinted in Works, VIII, 237. It is interesting to note that a few years later,
two of the three poets that Edward FitzGerald chose for translation were those mentioned
by Emerson. FitzGerald translated the Ruba‘iyyat of Omar Khayyam, the Language of Birds
[Mantiq al-tayr] by Attar and Salaman and Absal by Jami. Even more interestingly, Fitzgerald
compared Omar Khayyam with Emerson and wrote: “I wonder that Persia could have
produced anything so like Emerson where Emerson is truest and greatest.” Quoted in
J. H. Thonet, “Etude sur Edward Fitz-gerald et la literature persone, d’apres les sources
 Emerson on Hafiz and Sa‘di 149

originale” (Bibliotheque de la faculte de philosophie et letters de l’universite de Liege,

H. Valliant-Carmann, Paris, Champion, 1929), 21–2.
66. Emerson, Works, VIII, from “Persian Poetry,” 247.
67. Ibid., 261.
68. E. B. Cowell, “Hafiz, the Persian Poet,” Fraser’s Magazine, L, 288 ff (September
1854).
69. Emerson, Works, VIII, 257.
70. Emerson, Journals, VII, 277.
71. Ibid., 277.
72. Emerson, Poems, “From the Persian of Hafiz I.”
73. In his notebook called Orientalist, Emerson wrote of Hafiz, “he uses wine as a
symbol of intellectual freedom.” In the essay on Persian Poetry, he further remarked: “But
the love or the wine of Hafiz is not to be confounded with vulgar debauch. It is the
spirit in which the song is written that imports, and not the topics.”
74. Emerson, Works, VIII, 246.
75. Joel E. Benton, Emerson as a Poet, 28, 29.
76. Emerson, Journals, VIII, 488.
The Disciple:
Walt Whitman
 6

Whitman and Hafiz

Expressions of Universal Love and Tolerance

Mahnaz Ahmad

The issue of universal love and tolerance is common to different cultural and
poetic traditions. This is the common thread that unites the mystical poetry of
the fourteenth-century Persian Sufi poet Hafiz, and the visionary outpourings
of nineteenth-century American poet, Walt Whitman. In Hafiz and Whitman we
have two poets who are keenly aware of their contexts and the world around
them, but convey a deep sense of the spiritual oneness of all life. Their poetry
is the expression of a humanistic vision of the world, with love being the pri-
mary driving force. In “Song of Myself,” Whitman, in a moment of mystical
insight, says,

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and joy and
  knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth;
And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of
  my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of
  my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers . . .
  and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love;1

And Hafiz writes,

Within the Magian tavern

The light of God I see;

153
154 Mahnaz Ahmad

In such a place, O wonder!

Shines out such radiancy.2

And again:

See God’s creation mirrored in your own face

I send you an all-revealing mirror.3

Hafiz’s belief in the interconnectedness of all creation stems from two

important doctrines of Sufism. First is the doctrine of the “Transcendent Unity
of Being” (wahdat al-wujud) and second is the doctrine of the “Universal or
Perfect Man” (al-insan al-kamil). All things are theophanies of the Divine names
and qualities and derive their existence from the One being who alone Is. Man
is the only creature in this world who can reflect the Divine names and qualities
in a total and conscious manner just as the mystic is the one who realizes all the
possibilities of the human state—the Perfect Man. As such he is the microcosm,
in whom are reflected all the perfect attributes of the macrocosm.
There are two sides to the concept of God and the universe: the first is
the orthodox view, seeing God in terms of the sovereign will, as the creator
of the world, the Almighty ruler; and the second is an outlook influenced by
Neoplatonic philosophy. This conceives of the world as the emanation from the
Deity and sees God as the hidden essence or reality of all things. While God
is thus immanent in all things, he is yet the transcendent home and goal of all
things. Under the influence of Neoplatonism, the principle of divine unity, which
is fundamental to Islam, “God—there is no God but Him,” came to mean that
God is not merely the sole cause of existence but that He alone has real being.
So far as anything else exists at all, it exists as a ray of His light. The world is
thus the self-revelation of God and it is the aspiration of the mystic to pierce
the veil of outer things to see the Truth. While God permeates the phenomena
of the world, He still remains in His eternal being above and beyond the flux
of nature.
In their conception of man, the Sufis adopt a dual attitude. On one hand
they are aware of the sinfulness and imperfections of human nature, on the other
hand they see the Divine light in the soul of man. The soul is a mirror that is
soiled and covered with rust, but which may be cleansed and polished, so as to
reflect the beauty of the higher world. Although man has descended into this
world, he still possesses the inner sight (sirr) whereby he may rise into immediate
contact with God. The deepest part of man’s soul is divine.
In his “Song of Myself,” Whitman takes us through his experience of
awakening of the self to an awareness of a divine design, a plan transcending
the self and all things animate and inanimate, seen and unseen. He acknowledges
 Whitman and Hafiz 155

in Section 17: “These are the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they
are not original to me.”4
Sufi ideas found a way into Whitman’s spiritual development under the
influence of Emerson. James Russell in his work Emerson and the Persians points
out that Emerson was inspired by the beauty of Sufi poetry and its underlying
philosophy, which he knew through German translations. “It is a standard aspect
of Persian Sufi poetry, from the earliest times, that the great mystical revelation
is—or at least verges upon—pantheism. That is to say, the fully realized mystic
discovers that what he thought to be his individual ego, his contingent being,
is irrelevant or illusory, and vanishes altogether in the great experience of self-
extinction, Arabic fana’ fi’llah, in the One, in God.”5 According to Russell, it
was Emerson’s translation of Persian poets like Hafiz, and his ideas derived from
“the visionary and philosophical traditions of the ancient world” that influenced
Whitman. Whitman, like the Sufis, saw the transcendent expressed in humanity.
He was aware of a cosmic presence in every man. The belief in the essential
divinity of man is echoed in Whitman’s poetry. In one of his poems he inquires,
“Was somebody asking to see the soul? See, your own shape and countenance,
persons, substances, beasts, the trees, the running rivers, the rocks and sands.”
He talks of man as the “microcosm of all creation’s wildness, terror, beauty and
power,” and sees God in “the faces of men and women, and “in my own face in
the glass.”6 There is in Whitman, as in Sufi poets, an intuitive awareness of self
to God, to other men and women, and to nature. From such awareness comes
tolerance and understanding:

Each of us inevitable,
Each of us limitless—each of us with his or her right upon the
earth
Each of us allow’d the eternal purports of the earth,
Each of us here as divinely as any is here.7

This is Walt Whitman in his poem “Salut Au Monde” enfolding humanity in

his embrace, accepting differences in creed, color, race, and social standing. He
writes, “I think some divine rapport has equalized me with them.”8
In Hafiz’s poetry, tolerance is derived from his philosophy of unreason,
which scorns reason as a way of knowing God, and which preaches self-aban-
donment to a greater Truth. An examination of Hafiz’s poetry reveals that he
does not write religious or divine poems as such, though a few poems deal
purely with the mystical relationship between the soul and God. The striking
thing about Hafiz’s approach to the question of Sufism is the unconventionality
of his ideas. Throughout his Divan, he takes care to distinguish himself from
the ascetic zahid and the Sufi, and to project his own version of true and pure
156 Mahnaz Ahmad

Sufism. Tearing away the veil of hypocrisy, formalism, and asceticism from insti-
tutionalized religion, he reaches for the essence—the core of mysticism, as it
were, by declaring himself a lover and a profligate: “Openly I declare, and I say
it with glee / The slave of love am I, and from both worlds free.”9 Disassociating
himself from the puritanical ascetic, he puts forward the theory that: “Whether
drunk or sober all are seeking the Friend / The House of Love is everywhere,
whether mosque or church.”10
Hafiz will accept no boundaries or limitations. His belief in the infinite
possibilities open to human beings in their search for Truth comes into direct
conflict with the narrow sectarian beliefs and piety of the puritanical ascetic,
who worship out of fear of punishment or desire for reward. Hafiz opposes the
legalists who dominated so much of Islamic life in his time. The legalists were
opposed to Sufism, because it claimed knowledge of God distinct from codified
religion. For Hafiz, God is infinite, and the only love worthy of God is infinite.
Hafiz sees himself as the liberated man. He is opposed to the ascetic who is a
prisoner of the world because he is bound by conventions and taboos and thus
constantly in fear of infamy: “Tell the sermonizer not to fault Hafiz, who’s / left
the cell, / Freeman’s feet aren’t restrained—if he’s gone away / he’s gone.”11 The
ascetic who preaches one thing and practices another is hardly a true lover of
God, for his main concern is with the image he presents to the world, whereas
the true mystic transcends religious differences and sectarian prohibitions: “Don’t
consider ill fame if you’re the follower of love’s way, / Shaikh Sanaan left his
mantle in pawn at the vintner’s shop.”12
Paul Smith talks of Hafiz’s joyful humanity and love of nature, his freedom
of thought and spirit, and the sincerity and self-reliance that attracted Emer-
son to Hafiz. These are precisely the qualities that permeate Whitman’s poetry.
Whitman was deeply influenced by Emerson. In “One Hour to Madness and
Joy,” Whitman’s language of inebriation, of losing oneself to the infinite One, is
reminiscent of Hafiz when he writes, “O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than
any other man,”13 and, “To ascend, to leap to the heaven of the love indicated
to me! / To rise thither with my inebriate soul! / To be lost if it must be so!”
However, Hafiz’s symbolism of wine and inebriation has to be understood
in context of his brand of mysticism. In order to distinguish between the self-
centered cleric and the true mystic, Hafiz resorts to his famous cluster of images
centering on the wine-shop. The rind (vagrant) who drains the cup of wine to
the dregs is the mystic, and the kharabat (tavern) itself stands as a concrete sym-
bol in opposition to the mosque, church, or anything representing formal and
institutional religion. The reprobate rind, intoxicated and disorderly, has drunk of
the wine of love and he comes closer to the truth than the sanctimonious Sufi
with his rosary and prayer-book. Hafiz writes, “On the day of reckoning I fear,
the religious elder’s lawful bread, / Cannot compete with our forbidden liquor.”14
 Whitman and Hafiz 157

In trying to understand Hafiz’s attitude toward mysticism, it is important

not to underestimate his anti-orthodoxy. He was against asceticism practiced for
its own sake and against the unaccommodating, sterile, and narrow religion of
the ascetics. He saw the essence or religion as something vast and illimitable,
something that went beyond the confines of the mosque, church, and monastery;
something that could be acquired in the strangest of places, as “the magian’s
tavern.”
Hafiz saw any form of monasticism as quite inimical to the true spirit of
Islam, particularly to the mystical aspect. He stresses the relationship between the
individual and a personal God outside the rigid codes laid down by ritualists,
who have no comprehension of the truth, that which can be gained through
love alone: “Hafiz, seek not the jewel of love in the monastery’s confines, / Step
abroad, if you have the desire to seek.”15
Hafiz’s mysticism is the mysticism of love. For him, the cloister and the
penitential robes of the Sufi are as unsatisfying and hypocritical as the formal
religion of the orthodox theologian and lawyer: “In the magian’s world, a lover
like me there is none, / The woolen khirqah lies pawned here, wine-cup and
/ Book there.”16 In his notebook, Whitman talks about the meeting ground
of all religions: “[T]he clear atmosphere above them—There all meet—previ-
ous distinctions are lost—Jew meets Hindu, and Persian, Greek and Asiatic and
European and American are joined—and any one religion is just as good as
another.” Whitman expresses dissatisfaction with codified religion, and proclaims
an alternative which is more liberating and all-encompassing: “I do not despise
you priests, all times, the world over, / My faith is the greatest of faiths and
the least of faiths, / Enclosing worship ancient and modern and all between
ancient and modern.”17 Like Hafiz, Whitman sees love as the unifying force in
the universe. “The Mystic Trumpeter” announces the theme of love:

Blow again trumpeter! And for thy theme,

Take now the enclosing theme of all, the solvent and the setting,
Love that is pulse of all, the sustenance and the pang,
The heart of man and woman all for love,
No other theme but love—knitting, enclosing, all diffusing love.18

In his essay, Whitman and an All-Inclusive America, James Russell has drawn
an interesting parallel between Whitman and Hafiz. In his interpretation, the
two poets share a vision of a world based on love. Hafiz wrote a famous ode
that speaks of a “lost city of lovers” ruled by kindness, friendship, and equality.
Whitman recreates this city of love in the vision of America that he proj-
ects in Leaves of Grass. For Whitman, his book, himself, and his nation were
one and indivisible, as well as all encompassing, a home for wanderers and
158 Mahnaz Ahmad

outcasts, like the “thoughtful Armenian” he mentions in his poem “Salut Au

Monde!”19
Hafiz’s “lost city” is a nostalgic longing for a time gone by, when lovers
were inebriated by the wine of unreason: “Nobody has the taste for drunken-
ness—what happened to the wine-drinkers?”20
Hafiz tries to recreate in his poetry a world where roses bloom and
nightingales sing and where “Love was to replace law, indeed, it was to be the
only law.” Despite the chaos and uncertainty in the world around him, Hafiz
remains steadfast in his belief that this “old world will become youthful again.”
Whitman, on the other hand, sees the realization of his dream as imminent in
his homeland, in the New World.

I dream’d in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks

  of the whole of the rest of the earth,
I dream’d that was the new city of Friends,
Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love, it led
the rest.21

Love is the underpinning, or “kelson” of Whitman’s “city of Friends.” James

Russell explains, “The kelson is a line of timber that fastens a ship’s floor timbers
to the keel: it holds together the top and bottom where the two sides of the craft
meet, so it is the unifying factor in all directions, the center and soul of the struc-
ture, in touch with all, necessary to all. The kelson of the ship America is love.”22
Love is central to Hafiz’s worldview. This love is many-faceted. As Mahmud
Human points out:23 when Hafiz advocates the path of love, the love he talks
about is a combination of sensual, intellectual (Platonic), and spiritual love. The
love can be heterosexual or homosexual. Hafiz eulogizes love, love in all its
aspects. He does not reject either the erotic, symbolized by the “venus-browed”
and the “soft-bodied” (zohreh jabinan wa nazok badanan), or the spiritual, sym-
bolized by the man of God, the “magian elder” (pir-i moghan). Love can be
experienced and enjoyed in different ways by different people, depending on
their vision and growth. Those who cannot fathom the mysteries of “higher
love” would do well to seek the “bodies soft and delicate” and thus attain the
spiritual through the physical. This idea is based on the mystical belief in the
physical world as the world of illusions, which had its source in the Platonic
and Neoplatonic idea that this world is but a reflection of the real world, arche-
typal world (alam-i missal),24 and that physical beauty, human goodness, etc., are
imperfect shadows, representations in crude matter of heavenly and immaterial
forms of beauty and goodness. The mystic thus learns first to love earthly beauty,
then, when he perceives that this is but the reflection of the eternal beauty, his
love is set upon God. “Love, beloved and wine, these I’ll never give up, / A
hundred times I’ve repented, but never again.”25
 Whitman and Hafiz 159

Asheq Sho (be a lover) is the cry echoing through Hafiz’s poetry. The theme
of inebriation and love are linked together in Hafiz’s vision. Love and wine have
a similar effect of releasing the ego from the phenomenal world; the lip of the
beloved and the wine-bowl are complementary to each other; the wine is both
the ruby-red wine of the grape and wine of divine love and ecstasy. The saqi,
or cupbearer, is the earthly beloved and drinking partner, as well as the divine
beloved. In his poetry, Hafiz ranges unobtrusively and naturally through the vari-
ous nuances and meanings in the span of a single poem. The spiritual and the
sensual are an integral part of his mature vision and exist together, enhancing
one another. A subtle harmony and equilibrium is maintained between different
spheres of being. He is not a pure sensualist nor is there a dichotomy between
the physical and the spiritual in his vision. Like most Sufis, he sees the physical
as a bridge to the spiritual. There is much to be enjoyed in the physical world
and Hafiz scoffs at the zahid, or ascetic, who would deprive himself of happi-
ness in this world in hope of the “pleasures of paradise.” Addressing the zahid
he says: “You’ve told all wine’s defects, tell its virtues too: / Pandering to vulgar
minds, don’t flout logic.”26
Yet at the same time, Hafiz is aware that nothing is untainted by the hue
of mortality, and that pleasures are short-lived. The vicissitudes of mortal existence
cannot be shut off from the mind by a total indulgence in the senses. Life for
him is as it is for Percy Bysshe Shelley, a “dome of many-colored glass, that
stains the white radiance of eternity.”27 Yet the beauty of this dome cannot be
denied; in fact, the beauty reaffirms the perfect beauty of its maker.
Whitman, like Hafiz, is aware of the interdependence of the body and the
soul, the physical and the spiritual. In “Song of Myself,” he declares:

I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,

The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are
with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself . . . the latter I translate
into a new tongue.28

Whitman accepts the body, not as something to be reviled and degraded,

nor as a necessary evil that needs to be mortified, but as a stepping-stone to
the spiritual. He describes the soul and body as intimate lovers: “the hugging
and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night, / and withdraws at
the peep of the day with stealthy tread.”29
Whitman says:

I believe in the flesh and the appetites,

Seeing hearing and feeling are miracles, and each part and tag of
me is a miracle.
160 Mahnaz Ahmad

Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or

am touched from.30

Whitman’s concept of self includes both body and soul, and God can only be
apprehended through the complete self. In “Song of Myself ” he writes,

Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not
my soul.
I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.31

Like his “graybeard Sufi” in A Persian Lesson, Whitman sees the divine
“immanent in every life and object.” Sometimes Whitman uses the language of
transcendence and sees God in “limitless space” and “limitless time,” but God
is also the “great Camerado.” Using imagery from earthly love, Whitman refers
to God as a lover who leaves messages for him, “I find letters from God dropt
in the street, and everyone is sign’d by God’s name.” Massud Farzan points out
that Whitman’s experience of the divine, as described in section five of “Song
of Myself,” is closer to the beloved of the Sufi than the “abstract deity . . . the
Brahman of the Indian sage.”32 Whitman’s language has parallels with Sufi poets
like Hafiz, who use sensuous, even erotic, imagery to describe the union of
the soul with God. Hafiz views the relation between the creator and created
as that of a lover and beloved. The dynamic force of love and longing inspired
many mystic-poets who looked to the Qur’an for appropriate verses to justify
their expression. For example, the famous surah, “We indeed created man; and
we know what his soul whispers to him, and we are closer to him than the
jugular vein,”33 inspired many poets. Human love was seen as an analogue to
the love of God. For the Sufi, the world of the senses has no final or intrinsic
value or reality, but it is not a mere illusion from which one must step aside.
It is a shadow, an image or reflection of the Truth, a gateway to the real world.
For Whitman the world of the senses, “seeing, hearing, feeling are miracles.”
His aim is to purify and transfigure the physical through an acceptance of the
physical world, by celebrating the body. It is through the transfigured senses that
he arrives at mystical consciousness. “Through me forbidden voices / Voices of
sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil, / Voices indecent by me
clarified and transfigure’d.”34
The most important lesson Whitman learned from the “graybeard Sufi” is
that logic and discursive reasoning have never provided all the answers and that
the solution to the baffling mystery of life lies in a mystical surrender of the
limited human ego to the infinite self in an act of love. “Logic and sermons
never convince,” Whitman says in “Song of Myself.” Nor is he satisfied by the
“proofs” and “figures” presented by the “learn’d astronomer.” In his acceptance
 Whitman and Hafiz 161

of life in all its complexity, Whitman understands “the puzzle of puzzles / And
that we call Being.” Whitman’s poetry echoes Hafiz’s philosophy: “Be happy and
let not your mind contend with Being and not-Being / For not Being is the
end of everything that is.”35
For Hafiz, not-Being, or nisti, is not death or oblivion, but rather an
abandonment of self to a greater self, through love, tolerance, and acceptance of
human frailty. In “Song of Myself,” Whitman’s mystical experience leads him to
the conclusion that the key to human life is not “chaos or death—it is form,
union, plan—it is eternal life—it is Happiness.” He reiterates this realization in
“Song of the Open Road.”

Here is the efflux of the soul,

The efflux of the soul comes from within through embower’d
gates, ever provoking questions.

The efflux of the soul is happiness.36

Likewise, Hafiz believes that, “except through affliction, none arrives at happi-
ness,”37 and he embraces life as an inscrutable mystery which has to be endured.
Whitman too embraces life with all its multiplicity and contradictions. “Do I
contradict myself? / Very well then . . . I contradict myself; / I am large . . . I
contain multitudes.”38
Both Hafiz and Whitman seek out love as the great equalizer in a world
that is full of imperfections. This love is the infinite love that pours out from
God to humanity and informs every living thing. There is in both poets a belief
in the oneness of creation and a sense of the divine presence in human life.
Whitman looked to a time when there would be no need for priests and every
man, through the divinity within him, would be his own priest. Like Hafiz, he
believed that the object of life is to know and experience the divinity within
each one of us, and this can be achieved through the transformation of the
heart in love.

Notes

  1. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York: Modern Library, 1980).

  2. Arthur J. Arberry, Hafiz, Fifty Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1970), 117.
  3. Translated from Persian by author, from Muhammad Qazwini and Qasim Ghani,
Divan of Hafiz, (Teheran, 1941), number 83. This will be referred to as QG throughout
with the number indicated by #.
  4. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Section 17.
162 Mahnaz Ahmad

  5. James Russell, “Emerson and the Persians,” Lecture Series: Near East in the
Mind of America (Harvard, 2002).
  6. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Section 48.
 7. Ibid.
 8. Ibid.
 9. Author’s translation, QG, #317.
10. Author’s translation, QG, #80.
11. Author’s translation, QG, # 83.
12. Author’s translation, QG, # 77.
13. Paul Smith, “Hafiz of Shiraz: Hafiz’s influence on Western Poetry,” <www.
hafizofshiraz.com>.
14. Author’s translation, QG, #11.
15. Author’s translation, QG, #11.
16. Author’s translation, QG, #386.
17. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Section 43.
18. Ibid., 250.
19. Russell, “Emerson and the Persians.”
20. Ibid.
21. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 105.
22. Russell, “Emerson and the Persians.”
23. Mahmud Human, Hafiz che miguyad (Teheran: 1938).
24. This idea is expounded in detail by Ibn Al-Arabi. See Annmarie Schimmel,
The Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975).
25. Translated by author, QG, #343.
26. Translated by author, QG, #182.
27. Neville Rogers, ed., Complete Poetical Works of Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1972).
28. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Section 21.
29. Ibid., Section 3.
30. Ibid., Section 24.
31. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Section 3.
32. Massud Farzan, “Whitman and Sufism: Towards A Persian Lesson” American
Literature (January 1976), 572–582.
33. Qur’an 50:16.
34. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Section 24.
35. Translated by Author, QG, #25.
36. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Section 7.
37. Translated by Author, QG, #25
38. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Section 51.
 7

Walt Whitman and Sufism

Towards “A Persian Lesson”1

Massud Farzan

Interest in Whitman as a prophet and mystic is not new. Emerson and Thoreau—
to mention only two famous nineteenth-century names—more than anything
else praised his Leaves of Grass for the passion and profundity of its mystical
visions and messages. However, during the early part of the twentieth century,
particularly during the academic flowering of formalism and T. S. Eliot’s literary
theories, attention was focused on Whitman as a poet of compactly structured
lyrics such as the “Lilacs” poem or segments contained in “Drum Taps.” By
contrast, the vast mystical panegyrics of, say, “Song of Myself ” or “The Song of
the Open Road” were underestimated, at times dismissed with such designations
as “a needless pretext.” The phrase is Eliot’s.2
During the 1960s, with the publication of Start With the Sun: Studies in
Cosmic Poetry by the poet Karl Shapiro and others, attention seems to have been
once again redirected to Whitman’s importance as a poet of mystic conscious-
ness. “He is one mystical writer of any consequence America has produced,”
Shapiro writes, “the poet of the greatest achievement.”3 The consequence of
such dramatic reevaluation of Whitman has been twofold. First, a number of
academic scholars have investigated formal pattern and symbolic unity in “Song
of Myself,” discovering previously unrecognized structures. Second, critics have
willingly studied and written on Whitman’s mystical poetry qua mystical poetry.
Of particular significance and value have been a number of comparative studies
in which the influence on Whitman by other mystics and mystical works, as
well as relevant parallelisms, have been investigated.4 As such, by far the most
typical studies have been related to Vedantic, Buddhist, and Hindu classics. The
famous statement of Thoreau, upon meeting Walt Whitman in 1855, that Leaves

163
164 Massud Farzan

of Grass was “wonderfully like the Orientals” is usually prefatory to these com-
parative studies.5
No similar studies have been made with regard to Whitman’s indebtedness
and similarity to Persian mystics and, more specifically, the Sufi-inspired poets such
as Rumi, Sa‘di, and Hafiz, even though as early as 1866 a noted British Orientalist,
Lord Viscount Strangford, called attention to the astounding affinity of Leaves of
Grass, in its spirit, content, and form alike, to Persian poetry.6 While Strangford’s
comments were undoubtedly exaggerated, there is no reason why Whitman would
not have been acquainted with the Sufi poets of Persia and highly influenced by
their thought and poetry. His contemporary kindred soul, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
was extremely interested in the Sufis, having read their works extensively and writ-
ten about them, notably Sa‘di and Hafiz. Thoreau too was fond of the Sufis and
had quoted from Sa‘di’s Gulistan in Walden. More unequivocally, though, Whitman’s
own 1891 poem A Persian Lesson—originally called A Sufi Lesson7—is indeed a
surprisingly accurate and inspired reflection of Persian Sufism.
All the same, the affinity between Leaves of Grass and the work of Persian
Sufi-poets has been ignored or merely passed over. The claims of Lord Strangford
have not been put to any serious test, nor has Whitman’s A Persian Lesson received
any worthwhile exploration. It is not my intention in this essay to corroborate
Strangford’s contention that Whitman “instead of wasting his gifts on Leaves of
Grass . . . should have translated Rumi.”8 Nor do I intend to show that Whit-
man’s mysticism was of an unquestionably Sufic variety: no genuine mystic draws
distinctions between varieties of mysticism. Accordingly as a mystic, Whitman is
neither more Sufic than Vedantic, more Christian than Hindu. Instead, it is my
purpose to show that there are indeed striking similarities between Whitman and
the Sufi poets, so much so that it is altogether conceivable that Whitman had
been influenced more by Persian Sufi poetry than any other mystical works and
that his unique old-age poem, A Persian Lesson, presents a marvelous fruition of
a long acquaintance with and immersion in Sufism.

A Song of Myself

A famous fragment in the mystical poetry of Leaves of Grass is section five of

“Song of Myself,” which tells of the poet’s metaphysical experience of a clear
summer morning, during which “Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace
and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth.” A noteworthy charac-
teristic of this section is one of duality: “I believe in you, my soul, the other I
am must not abase itself to you.” What is of particular interest, however, is that
the “soul”—and what the poet addresses as “you” in section five—is also the
beloved of the “I.” One could call that entity an ordinary human being—male
or female—and the passage an ordinary love poem with touches of eroticism.
 Walt Whitman and Sufism 165

There is in fact enough in the lines of sexual imagery—supported by similar

passages in later sections of Song of Myself—to warrant such a point of view:

I mind once how we lay such a transparent summer morning

How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d
over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone . . .9

On all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs,

Straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip,
Behaving licentious toward me, taking no denial,
Depriving me of my best for a purpose,
Unbuttoning my clothes, holding me by the bare waist. . . .10

Yet in the language of carnal love, Whitman is actually representing mystical expe-
riences. As such, it will be seen, Whitman’s triumvirate of lover-soul-deity reveals
an interesting similarity, not so much to the “abstract deity . . . the Brahman, or
rather Parabrahman, of the Indian sage, devoid of all personal attributes,”11 but to the
Beloved of the Sufi poet. The Sufi’s primary desire to bring the I-Thou relation-
ship, the microcosm-macrocosm duality, to complete fusion and oneness, finds its
most convenient and poetic expression in the love-sex relationship between two
people. Here is Hafiz in one of his most famous ghazals from the Divan:

Hair disarrayed, cheeks beflushed, holding the cup

Bosom displayed, laughing, ghazal-chanting
  Eyes challenging, lips whispering charms—

So came my lover, at midnight, sat by my bedside

Reached over and said with taunt:
“Are you asleep my lover of old times?”

A Sufi who is offered such a night-cap

Would be a betrayer of love, if he didn’t become a wine
worshipper.

Go tell the ascetic not to flout the poor dreg-drainers

Whatever was poured in eternity to our cups, we drank up—
Whether from the wine-cellars of paradise or the corner pub.12

“My lovers suffocate me,” Whitman says in a mock-plaintive tone, “coming

naked to me at night.”13 And in a manner reminiscent of the recollection scene
of section five, Rumi says in his celebrated Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi:
166 Massud Farzan

Happy the moment when we were seated in the palace,

  thou and I
With two forms and with two figures but with one soul,
  thou and I
The colors of the grove and the voices of the birds will
  bestow immortality
At the time when we should come into the garden,
  thou and I.14

It should be noted that the introduction of the language of human love

to Persian mystical poetry is the by-product of a larger scheme: to replace the
discursive and abstract with the concrete and the tangible. Whitman explains the
same point though in a somewhat different way: “This effusion of corporation
of the soul is always under the beautiful laws of physiology—I guess the soul
itself can never be anything but great and pure and immortal; but it makes itself
visible only through matter—a perfect head, and bowels and bones to match is
the easy gate through which it comes from its embowered garden.”15 Once the
poet uses the language of ordinary heterosexual (or homosexual) love relation-
ship to express mystic love, he goes all the way, bringing all the ramifications of
the latter, such as jealousy and possessiveness, to the language of mystical love:
“I think of rimes and the Beloved taunts / ‘Don’t think of aught but me’ ”
(Rumi). Repeatedly the Sufi masters drive it home that the prime requisite for
the Sufi path is the feeling of want, the thirsting, the taste. It would then be quite
conceivable to find a book of mystical poetry in an “extraordinary collection of
small imagist poems, versified short stories, realistic urban and rural genre paint-
ings, inventories, homilies, philosophizing, farcical episodes, confessions, and lyric
musings. . . .” This is Richard Chase’s list16 of what makes up “Song of Myself,”
but it could be an equally accurate designation of Rumi’s Mathnavi or Sa‘di’s
Gulistan. Argument, abstraction, and getting stuck in logistics are anathema to
Whitman and Persian poet-mystics alike:

To elaborate is no avail, learn’d and unlearn’d

  feel that it is so17

I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.18

Knowing the perfect fitness and equity of things,

  while they discuss, I am silent. . . .19

And more directly Rumi says:

The legs of logicians are of wood;

Wooden legs are mighty untrustworthy.
 Walt Whitman and Sufism 167

And elsewhere:

I said to the Master, “Tell me the secret of the One and multiplicity.”
He said, “The wave, the foam, the eddy—they’re aught but the sea.”

Once in a while the poet of Leaves of Grass has barely started to expound
on the unnamable when he becomes aware of his mistake:

The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections,

They scorn the best I can do to relate them.20

And again, Rumi:

Whatever I say about love, I hang my face once I am in love.

Words are to elucidate, love can do without.
The pen was racing on paper, until it came to love and cracked.
The donkey of reason got bogged down in a mud-path.
All that was finally written about love and loving was love itself.
The sun rose as proof of the sun, feel it on your soul’s face
Why linger on the shadows as its sign?

One is reminded of Whitman’s poem about attending an astronomy lecture,

then coming out and gazing at stars. Or this, among many other similar lines,
from “Song of Myself,”

A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than all the

metaphysics of books.21

Parallelisms are too many to include in a brief introductory article such

as this. The main objective is to show with a few isolated examples how, in
manner and matter alike, Whitman reflects the Sufi-inspired poetry of classi-
cal Persian poets such as Rumi. In this light one may approach the puzzling
identities (or “Whitman’s images” as Leslie Fiedler put it) which the poet has
dispersed throughout Leaves of Grass.

Whitman and Rumi

Who is Whitman’s boisterous self-celebrating, self-singing “I?” Who is the

modest, self-effacing, wondering “I?” Who is “my soul?” Who is “my fancy?”
And how about the “I”’s unnamed interlocutors—who, for instance, is being
addressed when we read: “Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the
168 Massud Farzan

doors t­hemselves from their jamb!”? Likewise, who is Hafiz’s interlocutor in

the ghazal starting with the following lines: “Come let us scatter roses! Splash
wine into the goblets! / Destroy the world’s roof and cast a new design!” and,
“They call you from the heights of Arsh; / Your place is not this dingy, desolate
corner.” Or Rumi’s “thou” in “Happy the moment when we are seated in the
palace, thou and I?”
For Sufis the vocative “you” (or “thou”) is usually an entity whom the poet
loves or identifies with, and through whom he wants to annihilate the conscious
or selfish “I.” The “you” (which is sometimes named, such as Rumi’s Shams), can
be the master, an Ideal or Perfect Man, Love, God, soul, over-soul, and so on;
or, it is the Unconscious, if you will, who, to the extent that the conscious “I”
diminishes, becomes more and more real to the salik (Sufi neophyte). Thus the
vacuum created by the emptying of the conscious self is gradually filled with
the attributes of the Unknown.
In most of the “Song of Myself ” and other early poems of Leaves of Grass
the “I”—“undisguised and naked”—goes about, opening itself to all he sees in
his “journey,” absorbing, expanding—“And these tend inward to me, and I tend
outward to them, / And such as it is to be of these more or less I am.” He writes,

I am a Southerner soon as a Northerner, . . .

A Kentuckian walking the vale of the Elkhorn in my deer-skin
  leggings, a Louisianian or Georgian, . . .
Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion.

In the same manner Rumi announces:

Should there be any lover, O Muslims—it’s me

Should there be any believer, infidel, or Christian monk—it’s me  .  .  .
None of the world’s seventy-two sects and creeds
  exist, I swear by God. Every creed
  and sect there is—it’s me.

At one point in “Song of Myself ” Whitman sets about cataloguing what

he thinks constitutes the I; then he concludes: “But they are not the Me myself;”
and Rumi cries out:

What is to be done, O Muslims? for I do not recognize myself,

I am neither Christian nor Jew nor Gabr nor Muslim
I am not of the east, nor of the west, nor of the land nor of the sea
I am not of nature’s mist nor of the cycling heavens.
I am not of the earth, nor of water, nor of air, nor of fire. . . .
I am not of India, nor of China, nor of Bulgaria, nor of Saq-sin. . . .
 Walt Whitman and Sufism 169

The paradoxes of these self-identifications are evident and can be stated

and explained briefly: to the measure that the consciousness becomes emptied
of its makeup (conditionings, prejudices, individual and racial memories, and the
like), gradually the “I” becomes nothing and everything. Then the poet-mystic
talks of himself in the humblest of terms, now in the most self-exalting language.
It is this last aspect of Whitman’s self-identification that has raised eyebrows or
elicited derisive smiles.

I celebrate myself . . .22
I admire myself . . .23
I dote on myself. . . .24

Yet, compared to some of the mystical utterances of the Sufis, Whitman’s pro-
nouncements are quite mild. “Glory to me! How great is my glory!” proclaimed
the celebrated Persian Bayazid-i Bastami. And at a moment of ecstasy Hallaj cried
out, “I am the Truth.” He was accused of heresy, persecuted, and ultimately hung
in gallows; but fortunately Bastami was diagnosed as insane and eventually set free.
So long as any consciousness of the “I” and “me” is left—even though the
“I” may have been transformed and become “large” and “multitudinous”—there
is an experiencer; there is an observer distinct from the observed. Consequently,
there is space (between the observer and the observed) and time (the mechanism
of thought as past, present, and future). Because the “I”-consciousness is the
sum of whatever the mind gathers and accumulates, deliverance from it all via
death and dying becomes a paramount mystical experience and gets emphatic
poetic expression in mystic poetry. For Whitman and the Persian Sufi poets
alike, death is renewal, freedom, and part of the progressive evolutionary move-
ment in creation; hence the absurdity of fear and death and the recognition
that indeed “to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.” In
his Mathnavi, Rumi says:

I died as mineral and became a plant

I became animal once I died as plant
I died as animal and became man
Why should I then fear death?
When was I less by dying?

Once more shall I die as man

To become what man’s mind doesn’t contain.

“All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,” Whitman says; and as
if in chorus with Whitman, Rumi goes on:
170 Massud Farzan

The urge of each particle toward another, the procreant merging

of the opposites
Each desiring the other for its growth and motion
The urge of creation: rolling along on the tide-waves of love.
Otherwise the world would freeze upon itself
Otherwise no mineral would yearn to be plant
No animal would wish to die and become human.

With the mystical death (fana’) and consequent rebirth into “What man’s mind
doesn’t contain” (baqa’), the Sufi not only journeys to the Immeasurable or
God—that is, passes from plurality to unity—but becomes one with God. At
this stage even the mystic’s earlier statements such as “Divine I am inside and
out” become meaningless. For there is still here the duality of inside and out,
you and I, the lover and the Beloved. When the individual reaches the stage of
complete absorption the duality ceases altogether, the boundaries are obliterated,
inside and outside merge, and “All goes onward and outward” with grace and
beauty. Then the poet can bid goodbye to his Fancy. Or Rumi can celebrate the
death of the “I”; “Glory! Glory! I triumphed—no more do I / Know myself
as me. I burn with love. . . . / Glory! Joy! No mortal mind can fathom me.”25
It is then that the individual arrives at a profound stage of peace and
humility, the highest form of freedom and love.
It is on this note that A Persian Lesson—published in 1891 as one of
the poems of Goodbye My Fancy—starts and in which Whitman’s own mystical
peregrinations seem to have reached a new stage:

A Persian Lesson

For his o’erarching and last lesson the greybeard Sufi

In the fresh scent of the morning in the open air,
On the slope of a teeming Persian rose-garden
Under an ancient chestnut tree wide spreading its branches,
Spoke to the young priests and students.

“Finally my children, to envelop each word, each part of the rest,

Allah is all, all, all—is immanent in every life and object,
May-be at many and many-a-more removes—yet Allah, Allah,
Allah is there.

“Has the estray wander’d far? Is the reason-why strangely hidden?

Would you sound below the restless ocean of the entire world:
Would you know the dissatisfaction? the urge and spur of every life;
The something never still’d—never entirely gone? the invisible
need of every seed?
 Walt Whitman and Sufism 171

It is the central urge in every atom, (Often unconscious, often

evil, downfallen)
To return to its divine source and origin, however distant,
Latent the same in subject and object, without one exception.”

Here is presented a surprisingly compact poem in which is contained the

essence and synthesis of his earlier poems. Moreover, the poem has a distinctly
Sufi flavor—not only in the authenticity of setting, the repetition (in the man-
ner of Sufi zekr 26) of the word Allah, or such recognizably Sufi phrases as “the
invisible need of every seed”—but mainly because the whole poem presents a
marvelous coalescence of theme and tone.
As mentioned earlier, this poem was first published in 1891, when Whit-
man was seventy-one. It is interesting to note that Rumi’s Mathnavi has for its
prologue exactly the same “urge and spur of every life; / The something never
stilled . . . / To return . . .” I am referring to the celebrated Mathnavi poem
about the cut-off reed (a leaf of grass?), singing of its longing to return to the
reed-field, to its source. Whitman’s A Persian Lesson, it may be concluded, is not
an isolated case, the reflection of a brief interest in Sufism, without relevance to
the rest of the poet’s work. Rather it may very well be looked upon as a fitting
coda for Leaves of Grass, not only because it presents a synthesis and recapitulation
of the rest of the book, but also because of the marvelous sense of tranquility
and wholeness it conveys. It is here finally that we see the serenity of a man
who has said goodbye to his Fancy, and one wonders whether the “greybeard
Sufi” of the first line is not the good grey poet himself.

Notes

 1. This article first appeared in American Literature, Vol. 47, no. 4 (January 1976),
572–82. Republished by permission of the copyright holder, Duke University Press.
  2. See T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1934).
The complete sentence is: “When Whitman speaks of the lilacs or the mockingbird,
his theories and beliefs drop away like a needless pretext.” In a 1955 article (“Images
of Walt Whitman”) Leslie A. Fiedler examines “the endless insistence in Leaves of Grass
upon the first person, the deliberate confusion of the Mask and the self ” and wonders
with astonishment why Whitman became “the world’s looked-for, ridiculous darling.”
See Milton Hindus, ed., Leaves of Grass One Hundred Years After (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1955), 55 and 73.
  3. J. E. Miller, K. Shapiro, and B. Slote, Start With the Sun: Studies in Cosmic Poetry
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960), 58.
  4. For a list of such studies see Gay Wilson Allen, A Reader’s Guide to Walt Whit-
man (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1970), 29, 224–228.
 5. See, for example, V. K Chari, Whitman in the Light of Vedantic Mysticism: an
Interpretation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), vii.
172 Massud Farzan

  6. Lord Strangford, “Walt Whitman,” The Pall Mall Gazette, Feb. 16, 1866; quoted in
G. W. Allen, A Reader’s Guide to Walt Whitman (London: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1970) 28.
  7. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, eds. H. W. Blodgett and S. Bradley (Chicago:
1946), 552.
 8. Paraphrased in G. W. Allen, Walt Whitman Handbook (New York: New York
University Press, 1962), 474.
  9. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, “Song of Myself,” Section 5.
10. Ibid., Section 28.
11. F. Attar, The Conference of the Birds. trans and intro. by Dick Davis and Afkham
Darbandi (London: Penguin Books, 1984).
12. The translations from Persian poets are by the present author, unless otherwise
indicated.
13. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, “Song of Myself,” Section 45.
14. R. A. Nicholson, Rumi, Poet and Mystic (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1950), 53.
15. Emory Holloway, ed., Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman (New York:
P. Smith, 1921), 65.
16. Richard Chase, Walt Whitman Reconsidered (New York: William Sloane Associ-
ates, 1955), reprinted in C. Feidelson, and Paul Brodtkorb, eds., Interpretations of American
Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 180.
17. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, “Song of Myself,” Section 3.
18. Ibid., Section 4.
19. Ibid., Section 3.
20. Ibid., Section 14.
21. Ibid., Section 24.
22. Ibid., Section 1.
23. Ibid., Section 3.
24. Ibid., Section 24.
25. Cf. Whitman’s poem “Joy, Shipmate, Joy!”—“Joy, Shipmate, Joy! / Pleas’d to
my soul at death I cry, / Our life is closed, our life begins. . . .”
26. Zekr, or dhikr, means “invocation” and refers to the Islamic devotional act
of repeating the Names of God. In Sufism, this practice is part of daily sacred activity.
 The Initiates:
Other American Authors
 8

Literary “Masters” in the Literature of

Thomas Lake Harris, Lawrence Oliphant,
and Paschal Beverly Randolph

Arthur Versluis

Reference to American “literary masters” prompts one to think of well-known

authors like Emerson and Melville, whose work certainly alludes to Persian
Sufism and to Islam. Other articles in this collection discuss those kinds of
works in some detail. But there is another way to understand this term, and
that is with a different emphasis: we also can say “literary masters.” In this case,
we are looking not at great works of literature, but rather at works of literature
that incorporate and seek to convey one form or another of what we might
term adapted forms of Islamic esoteric religion. In effect, the authors present
themselves—or characters in their thinly disguised fiction—as spiritual masters,
and literature is the mode of initiatory transmission. But to what extent are these
Anglo-American nineteenth-century literary “masters” influenced by Islamic eso-
teric religion, and to what extent are they creating new religions? As we shall
see, they likely often are influenced by Islamic esoteric religion, but in effect
create new religious syntheses.
There are, broadly speaking, several angles from which one can approach
the question of Islamic influence in nineteenth-century England and America.
One is clearly exoteric: it focuses on social, political, and literary influences of
Islam. Such an approach is exemplified by Iraqi scholar Muhammed Al-Da’mi’s
Arabian Mirrors and Western Soothsayers,1 a survey of Victorian depictions of Islamic
culture and history that includes such figures as Thomas Carlyle, John Henry
Cardinal Newman, and Washington Irving. Irving’s approach is emblematic of
such Victorian views of Arab lands: his voluminous works on the Moorish pres-

175
176 Arthur Versluis

ence in Spain, like Mahomet and His Successors, look at Islamic Spain or at Islam
from the outside, in the manner of extended travelogues with an eye to what
in Islamic history might prove a model for the American republic. At the other
extreme of approaches, we find a far less well-known esoteric angle, as exem-
plified by such figures as Thomas Lake Harris, Laurence Oliphant, and Paschal
Beverly Randolph.
Muhammed Al-Da’mi does an excellent job of analyzing the Western-
centered, orientalist and exoteric or externalist approach to Islam as exemplified
in Carlyle, Newman, and Irving. Such an approach sees Islam mostly from the
outside and Islamic history as “a vestigial remnant of a dead era,” an attitude
that, he continues, we see lingering into the twenty-first century in the Bush,
Jr. administration’s attempt to impose “democratic values” on Iraq by way of
invasion and occupation. As al-Da’mi points out, “today’s ‘Western’ vision of a
‘new world order’ derives from the West-centered reading of history promoted
by such shapers of public opinion as Carlyle, Newman, and Irving, among oth-
ers.”2 As documented by Edward Sa‘id and many subsequent scholars, such an
approach to Arab countries has a long history, and still shaped much of Western
policies toward Islamic societies even into the late twentieth and early twenty-
first centuries.
But there is another aspect of Western engagement with Islamic cultures
that is much less well-studied or well-known, perhaps in part because it is much
more ambiguous, one may even say, mysterious. There are numerous examples
of esoteric authors whose works purport to reveal some secret teachings of
remote forms of Islamic mysticism—indeed, this is almost a genre of esoteric
works. One thinks of such twentieth-century authors as Gurdjieff, whose eso-
teric philosophy was said to have been drawn from his training in a remote
Sufi brotherhood in far-away Mongolia; or of the various Western Sufi orders
that sprang up during the twentieth century.3 What are we to make of such
individuals or groups? I think it is more productive to regard them as interest-
ing and creative phenomena in their own right than to dismiss them out of
hand or to denigrate them.
When we turn to more esoteric dimensions of cross-cultural communica-
tion, it becomes difficult to sort out exactly what was originally there in the
Islamic tradition, and what was projected onto “mysterious Islam” by the Western
esoteric author who sought to give his work an exotic “oriental” flavor. This is
the kind of question we face when we turn to the esoteric religious philosophies
of Thomas Lake Harris, Laurence Oliphant, and Paschal Beverly Randolph, all
nineteenth-century authors whose works were published in the United States,
and some of which were surprisingly influential. To what extent can we speak
of the “Islamic” magic and mysticism of these authors? That is the question we
will pursue here.
 Literary “Masters” 177

Thomas Lake Harris

The least explicitly influenced by Islam or by Sufism was Thomas Lake Harris,
but we must outline some of his works here in order to tell the related story
of his disciple, Laurence Oliphant. Harris was born in England, and immigrated
to America in 1828. In 1845, he became a Universalist minister, a career which
served him for less than two years, for in 1847 he joined the group of Andrew
Jackson Davis. But shortly thereafter, Harris left that group as well, resigning
because of Davis’s endorsement of “free love,” and joining the Swedenborgian
“Church of the New Jerusalem.” Although he lived with a group of spiritual-
ists from 1850 to 1853, he subsequently returned to proselytizing for Sweden-
borgianism, and traveled to England to do so, where he announced his own
esoteric millennialist group called the “Brotherhood of the New Life,” intended
for the “reorganization of the industrial world.” Harris established his group at
Brocton, Salem-on-Erie, New York, and finally in California. His Brotherhood
was known for its avant-garde views on sexuality, and drew heavily in later years
on the Western esoteric traditions.
It is clear that Harris’s characteristic views had been worked out by this
relatively early period, and that his subsequent, controversial life was an unfold-
ing of them. At the end of his life, early in the twentieth century and nearly
fifty years later, we find him:

1. Struggling against demonic influences and in visionary realms,

while
2. Suffering related physical torments, and
3. Regarding himself as the “pivotal man” in the world, the single
figure who incarnates the primal apocalyptic struggle between
good and evil.

Already in the 1850s we find Harris writing about “internal respiration,”

about the existence of “fays” or faeries, and about the spiritual importance of
male-female “counterparts,” a theory that derived from the Swedenborgian idea
of “conjugial” love.
Although he remains relatively little-known, Harris was a prolific author
and also wrote and published a number of hymns and songs. In addition to Arcana
of Christianity: An Unfolding of the Celestial Sense of the Divine Word (1858–1867),
Harris published a collection of extemporaneous lectures entitled The Millen-
nial Age: Twelve Discourses on the Spiritual and Social Aspects of the Times (1860), a
monograph on “universal religion” entitled The Breath of God with Man (1867),
and, in the book The Golden Child (1878), a daily chronicle of life in the
178 Arthur Versluis

California community Harris founded. Harris also left a significant body of

unpublished material. In essence, Harris joined together Christian millennialism
with Swedenborgian thought, but also drew on a range of other esoteric tradi-
tions. Harris is a fairly important figure whose work deserves fuller study than
it has yet received.
Hannah Whitall Smith, who was highly critical of him, wrote that Harris
had spent several years “in the Orient, where he learnt a strange vocabulary,”
and attracted adherents from as far away as Japan.4 Harris had not gone to Asia,
but he did have Japanese followers.5 Nonetheless, Harris was not influenced
very much by Asian religions. “Redemption of the body,” he tells his audience,
“is to begin with internal respiration,” and that might sound like some kind of
Buddhist meditative practice.6 However, Harris in fact refers to a particular kind
of breathing that derives from Swedenborg and that is conceived as a result of
divine grace. Harris’s esotericism was certainly primarily European in origin,
emerging out of Swedenborgianism.7
Harris’s teachings concerning male-female “counterparts” might be slightly
reminiscent of Tantrism, and might even have analogues in other forms of eso-
teric religion. But the theology—including a male-female divinity, a cult of the
Mother, and a belief in an enduring transcendent male-female spiritual body—
while it may have some tangential connection to the work of Jacob Böhme, is
chiefly Harris’s own.8 The doctrine of counterparts is this: each individual, male
or female, has a counterpart of the other gender. According to Harris, it is rare
for both counterparts to be incarnated and married; in general, one’s counterpart
is a spiritual being.9 One comes to know one’s counterpart through an inner
revelatory process, and contrary to the accusations laid against Harris’s Fountain
Grove community in particular, his was a quasi-ascetic arrangement whereby the
sexes were largely separated. In the personal accounts of some members, there
were sexual dimensions to the counterpart experiences, but those experiences
were of union with nonphysical beings. But it is also evident that Harris’s teach-
ings included a joint male-female transformative process.10
What distinguishes Harris’s visionary experiences is the pivotal role that he
himself plays in the invisible worlds or dimensions. He was often referred to by
his disciples as the “Primate,” sometimes with the name “Faithful,” and sometimes
even as “Primate Pivotal Twain-in-One.” His disciples regarded him more or less
similarly to the way Sufi disciples are said to regard their shaykh. He consistently
believed himself to intervene not only in local or regional metaphysical dimen-
sions, but also on a national and international as well as cosmic scale. Harris saw
himself as “the pivot,” a term quite similar to the Sufi term qutb.
But if there were an Islamic influence on Harris, from whence would it
have come? The answer is not from Harris having traveled in the Middle East,
but rather from his remarkable disciple, Laurence Oliphant.
 Literary “Masters” 179

Laurence Oliphant

Laurence Oliphant (1829–1888) was born to Anthony and Mary Oliphant, and
by the time he was ten, his father had been knighted. Sir Anthony and Lady
Oliphant were members of the Calvinist Protestant Reformed Church, and the
young Laurence grew up in Ceylon, where his father was Chief Justice, and in
England. Even as a youth and young man, Laurence Oliphant traveled a great
deal, spending much time in Europe as well as Ceylon. He had a lifelong close
relationship with his mother. In his early adulthood, he traveled through India
and Nepal, returned to England and passed the bar exam, traveled to Russia,
observed the Crimean war firsthand, became Lord Elgin’s private secretary on
the mission that negotiated a primary treaty between Canada and the United
States, and as Herbert Schneider put it, “embarked on one expedition after
another with reckless abandon and almost incredible energy.”11 He had seen
wars in numerous countries, served on diplomatic missions to China and Japan,
and later became a widely known war correspondent for the Times of London;
by 1865, he had been elected to the British Parliament.
The most controversial relationship of Oliphant’s life was with Thomas Lake
Harris, whom he met in England during Harris’s visit there. To the astonish-
ment and chagrin of his English peers, upon his election to Parliament, instead
of attending to his position, Oliphant applied for membership in Harris’s esoteric
community in New York State, and he became known as the silent member of Par-
liament for his refusal to speak there—even though that had been a long-standing
dream. Instead, he traveled to New York State about two years after his mother,
Lady Oliphant, had become a member of Harris’s community, called “the Use,” at
Amenia, New York. There, Oliphant, like his mother, subordinated himself to the
charismatic Harris as his “Father,” and worked as a farmhand, hoeing and doing
other manual labor in the vineyards and on the farm for ten or more hours a day.
Oliphant, formerly the archetypal man-about-town and man-of-the-world, lived in
a cold corner of a shed in total isolation, cleaning out stables and hauling rubbish.
Oliphant and his mother spent years in the Brocton community, which
grew to around one hundred members, and to significant relative wealth. That
wealth came from the shared resources of members, significant among which
were the Oliphants. Later, Harris and some select members of the community
moved to a huge estate near Santa Rosa, California, where again they devel-
oped considerable vineyards, and built a mansion on a high hill overlooking the
region. Oliphant returned to England, rejoined high society, married the striking
Alice le Strange Oliphant, and returned with her to New York. She traveled to
California to visit Harris there, but was not received well by Harris, who sent
her away. Oliphant and his wife subsequently broke from Harris’s community,
saw Harris himself as having gone astray, and after regaining Oliphant’s wealth
180 Arthur Versluis

through threatened legal action, made preparations to move to Palestine.

Oliphant later published two works that detailed his own esoteric teach-
ings, which turned on the various esoteric relationships possible between men
and women. These works bore the significant influence of his wife Alice, par-
ticularly the first of them, Sympneumata; or Evolutionary Forces Now Active in Man
(1885) and Scientific Religion; or, Higher Possibilities of Life and Practice through the
Operation of Natural Forces (1888), published in the year of Oliphant’s death. In
these books, we see Oliphant’s esoteric sexual teachings outlined in considerable
detail. He remained Christian to his deathbed, so these works are not a result
of Oliphant’s having entered into any esoteric Islamic or other orders; they are,
rather, the summation of his syncretic esoteric teachings.
That his esoteric philosophy was syncretic is quite visible in Oliphant’s
two-volume novel Masollam (1886). This novel was written and published after
Oliphant and his wife Alice had moved to Palestine to live, and after she had
unexpectedly died there. Oliphant believed that he was in communication with
her spirit, which was his spiritual counterpart. In Masollam, Harris’s erstwhile
disciple depicts himself as the hero with the transparently obvious name of
“Santalba” (implying “holy” and “white”) whereas Masollam (Harris) is depicted
as originally having real spiritual experience and insights, but as having gone
bad. Given Oliphant’s and Harris’s public and bitter parting of the ways, it is
not surprising that in the novel, Santalba and Masollam also undergo a bitter
split. While the novel is prolix—it could be less than half the length—it does
include some very interesting indications of Harris’s teachings.
Partway through the second volume, Santalba speaks to a Druse sheikh
[Druze shaykh],12 referring to a young woman named “Anima,” who had been
raised and trained by Masollam. Santalba tells the shaykh that

the world’s deliverance has come, and it has come in the form of a
woman. It could not be delivered hitherto, because the sexes were
divided; but in union is strength. It is only when the sexes are united
according to the divine intention that the redemptive forces for the
world’s deliverance can play through them; and it is through the
operation of the divine feminine that this union must be achieved.
This is the interpretation of your vision of the twofold Word.
Regard women, therefore—but especially the woman by your side
[Anima]—in a different light from what you have hitherto done.13

Sheikh Mohanna then responds: “You have said that the highest form of inspira-
tion could only descend by means of the operation of a conjunction of mas-
culine and feminine elements; and that therefore its most fitting receptacle was
an associated pair.”14
 Literary “Masters” 181

Sheikh Mohanna then asks: But what about one whose partner has died,
as Santalba’s (and in real life, Oliphant’s wife Alice) had? Santalba replies: “She
who was my associate on earth, and who has passed into higher conditions, is
not prevented thereby from co-operating with me . . . due to the fact that dur-
ing our external union we had, by long and arduous effort and ordeal, arrived
at a consummation, whereby an internal and imperishable tie had been created,
the mystery of which I dare not enter upon now.” Santalba asserts that his
“consociation” with his dead wife is not mere mediumship, but “a permanent
condition of free and independent mental association, with a pure intelligence
of the upper region.”15 In ordinary spiritualism, “the bodily health is injured, the
intellectual faculties are enfeebled  .  .  .  by the invasion of influences which torture
the mind and body which they have made their abiding-place, and which can-
not be ejected. It is the penalty which poor mortals pay for attempting to pry,
by disorderly methods, into the secrets of nature, which they are not meant to
penetrate.” By contrast, this higher union results in “increased mental vigor and
bodily strength, a consciousness of moral and intellectual freedom and spontaneity.
The individuality, instead of being suppressed, is reinforced. With every accession
of power, there flows in a rushing current of love for the human race, and a
desire to serve it. There is no longing to pry into mysteries, because knowledge
seems to ripen in the mind more rapidly than it can be acted on.”16
One could object that what we see above are Oliphant’s teachings, not
those of Harris. But earlier in the novel, Masollam (Harris) tells the young
Anima that “alone I am powerless; that it is only a woman who can feed me
with the elements which are essential to the ultimation of my forces, which
need this conjunction to render them operative. . . . For the rule of the man is
naught without the woman.”17 What we see, in both characters (i.e., Harris and
Oliphant), is that the spiritual union of man and woman is essential to their
teachings—and is a direct reflection of their theology of a male-female God. The
male-female nature of God is the secret discerned by Santalba’s Druze chieftain
friend Sheikh Mohanna, and it is central to the themes of the novel as a whole.18
Those who go astray in the novel—notably Masollam and his wife—do so by
detours away from spiritual union and divine service into passion or ambition.
The novel is not flattering to Harris, but it does nonetheless reveal how Oliphant
absorbed Harris’s teachings on the spiritual counterparts of men and women,
and then transposed those teachings into a Middle Eastern context.
In his travel memoir The Land of Gilead (1881), there are some quite
interesting intimations that Oliphant encountered esoteric teachings among two
groups in the Middle East: the Druze and the Ansariyeh, both of which, he says,
belong to the Isma‘ili tradition. Oliphant offers some quite interesting specula-
tions about Druze esoteric teachings, including the possibility that the Druze
have an emanationist dimension to their teachings, which bore connections to
esoteric Buddhism. He argues that ancient Persia was host to Buddhists, and
182 Arthur Versluis

that there was cultural cross-pollination between Buddhism and esoteric Islam,
as evidenced, among other things, by the Druze belief in reincarnation.19 Both
the Druze and the Ansariyeh, Oliphant insists, will assume whatever outward
religious form is necessary for survival, but they both also continuously maintain
esoteric teachings that are to be kept secret.
In a chapter about his visit to “an Ansariyeh village,” Oliphant discusses
in detail the origins, religious tenets and practices, and other customs of the
Ansariyeh. In one passage, Oliphant alludes to sexual mysteries among the Ansa-
riyeh, writing that although women are “never admitted to religious meetings,”
nonetheless there are “certain ceremonies, in which they must of necessity bear
an important part.” These ceremonies “are symbolical of the origins of man and
the productive powers of nature, which are highly honored and considered sacred
among them. In this they have much that was common to the Gnostics of the
early Church.” They are, Oliphant continues, “an offshoot from the Druze sect”
because they follow the “teaching of Nusair.”20 On the whole, Oliphant’s travel
memoir of his time in the Middle East suggests that although his own esoteric
sexual teachings did not have their origin in the Middle East, still he found
there (and in scholarship like Sacy’s), suggestions that there were such teachings
to be found in some religious sects, notably the Ansariyeh. The mystery remains,
and actually deepens with the introduction of our next author.

Paschal Beverly Randolph

Our third primary figure, Paschal Beverly Randolph, is every bit as fascinating
(and, for that matter, as prolific a writer) as were Harris and Oliphant. Randolph
was self-educated, grew up in the New York slums, and became one of the very
first African-American novelists, as well as one of the most widely influential
occultist authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Like Oliphant, Ran-
dolph was a world traveler, having sojourned not only in England and Europe,
but also, he said, in Egypt, Turkey, and possibly elsewhere in the Middle East, hav-
ing learned there magical practices and mystical teachings from obscure esoteric
lineages, most notably, from the Nusa’iri order. Randolph’s primary influence was
to bring sexual practices and teachings explicitly into Western magical orders,
and these teachings, he said, he learned during his journeys in the Middle East,
among Islamic mystics and magicians, and from a Muslim “dusky maiden” who
initiated him into the ways of esoteric sexuality.
Randolph’s tales of Middle Eastern travels and of learning esoteric tradi-
tions there should not be dismissed out of hand. In fact, one has to wonder
whether he also may have encountered some residual Sufism in the United States
during his youth or young adulthood. In an exceptional work of reconstruc-
tive scholarship, Black Crescent, Michael Gomez documents how Sufi orders had
 Literary “Masters” 183

moved into Black Africa prior to and during the period of the slave trade, and
of how representatives or devotees of those orders may very well have found
themselves in the United States. “Given the prominence of organized Sufism
in West Africa during the period of the transatlantic trade,” Gomez writes, “it
is difficult to imagine that Sufis did not arrive on North American shores.”
Sufism then, it seems, intermingled with Freemasonry in the Black community,
and along with Sufism may have come some Islamic forms of magic, including
amulet making.21 Such influences are shadowy, and tracing them is admittedly
speculative, but it is at least possible that Randolph’s later travels in the Middle
East were inspired by contact with some African Americans familiar with Sufism
or with variant forms of Islamic magical traditions.
Just as in the case of Harris and Oliphant, we have an exceptional book
detailing their lives and something of their works (Herbert Schneider’s A Prophet
and a Pilgrim), so too we have a remarkable survey of Randolph’s life and work
by John Patrick Deveney: Paschal Beverly Randolph: A Nineteenth-Century Black
American Spiritualist, Rosicrucian, and Sex Magician (1997). And here, although
reconstructing Randolph’s life and publication history requires some conjecture
or educated guessing, nonetheless Deveney also offers great depth of documenta-
tion, at least in terms of Randolph’s extensive publications and of many (though
not all) aspects of his unusual life. Randolph published many pamphlets and
books, and made numerous claims about his travels and esoteric connections,
so sorting all this out is a Herculean task.
Here, I will offer an overview of Randolph’s life and work, with an eye
to his probable connections with the Arabic world. Randolph was born in New
York City, the illegitimate son of a father who abandoned him to the streets.
He grew up in the Five Points, a notorious slum full of brothels and taverns,
but managed to teach himself to read and write—indeed, to develop a distinc-
tive literary style and later to absorb some French, Arabic, and Turkish as well.
Randolph acknowledged his African heritage when it was useful for him, but
had no problem denying it if that was the more beneficial course. Randolph
and his first wife, Mary Jane, both claimed Native American ancestry—at least
when it suited them. By 1853, Randolph had given up being a barber and had
put out his shingle as a “clairvoyant physician and psycho-phrenologist,” while
living in upstate New York. During this period, Deveney speculates, Randolph
“must have met Thomas Lake Harris, another sexual mage, who broke with
spiritualism when Randolph did (and for similar reasons) and whose name recurs
in Randolph’s works over the years.”22
In 1855, Randolph began a series of trips across the Atlantic, during
which he reportedly spent time in England, in Europe, and in the Middle East.
While the exact itinerary of Randolph’s travels is often unclear because of his
tendency toward myth-making, it is clear that, like Harris and Oliphant, he
rejected much of the contemporary “occult” scene, especially spiritualism, but
184 Arthur Versluis

also the ­ libertinism of the “free love” movement, and that he met many of
the most interesting esoteric authors of the period. Unlike Harris or Oliph-
ant, Randolph was very much interested in animal magnetism and in magical
traditions and orders, and claimed that he had moved in related circles both in
England and in France. What is particularly remarkable about Randolph is that
he apparently managed to travel so widely and to have moved in fairly esoteric
circles, all without any of the resources available to someone like the wealthy
Oliphant, even without the benefit of conventional education, and in a period
when travel was by no means easy or fast.23
It was in 1861–1862 that Randolph is said to have traveled throughout
the Middle East, and in particular in Egypt, Palestine, possibly in Lebanon, in
Constantinople, and in Turkey. The true extent of his travels is impossible to
verify, but it is clear that he returned with considerable knowledge of the use
of hashish, and with some knowledge of Arabic magical traditions. One English
author reported in 1862 that he had been “with the Dervishes, Persian Magi-
cians, and miracle workers, whom he astonished and confounded with exhibitions
of the higher sort of magic . . . and had received “a series of instructions in
Arab medicine, Persian metaphysics, and Egyptian magic.”24 This description, like
much concerning Randolph’s travels in the Middle East, strikes one as wildly
overblown, but it does show that at least one of his contemporaries apparently
believed his claims. After this time, a mysterious initiatory figure named “Pul
Ali Beg” appears in Randolph’s writings—but we might note that an alchemi-
cal work had circulated in England under the name “Ali Puli” since the late
seventeenth century.25 Such coincidences do make one wonder to what extent
Randolph’s travels account for his “Oriental” sources, and to what extent he was
drawing primarily on English Orientalism and “Oriental” archetypes, mingled
with his own powerful imagination. He was, after all, a fairly well received
novelist of the occult.26
Having settled in Boston after his earlier travels, Randolph was compelled
to move by the great Boston fire of 1872, during which he unfortunately lost
many of his baffling variety of publications, including numerous pamphlets, cir-
cular letters, and books by which he made his uncertain living. He moved even-
tually to Ohio, where he met an attractive young woman named Kate Corson,
whom he may or may not have married, and who bore him a son, Osiris Budh.
During this late period of his life, he apparently visited Europe once again, and
published a variety of books including his most influential work of sexual magic,
The Ansairetic Mystery, which revealed “the secret of the Ansaireh Priesthood of
Syria,” by which “men and women can call down to them celestial—almost
awful—powers from the Spaces, thereby being wholly able to reach the souls
of others, and hold them fast in the bonds of a love unknown as yet in this
cold land of ours.”27 Passages like this lend at least some credence to the claims
of some associated with the Theosophical Society, that Randolph was making
 Literary “Masters” 185

available secrets of “black magic.” It is apparently the case that, although H. P.

Blavatsky, the charismatic founder of the Theosophical Society, did refer favorably
to Randolph as a genuinely “half-initiated” Rosicrucian, she also was reportedly
hostile to him during this late period of his life. On July 29, 1875, Randolph was
found dead near his home of a gunshot wound to the head, evidently a suicide.
Randolph’s widow continued to market his books, and even acquired an
agent for them in England. Perhaps most famously, Maria Naglowska—herself
a flamboyant figure in the French occult scene during the 1920s and 1930s—
translated his works on sexual magic into French under the title Magia Sexualis.28
From the prior and subsequent circulation of Randolph’s works, his theories on
sexual magic became quite influential in European and English magical circles,
from there moving back again to the United States.29 Thus we can see the
complex circuits that Randolph and his work represented: from England and
Europe to the Middle East, from the Middle East to Europe and England, from
the United States to Europe and England and back again—the lines of circula-
tion are complex enough to warrant diagramming, and one has to wonder if, in
the end, anyone will be able to more thoroughly map this bewildering territory
than Deveney already has.

Conclusions

There are larger questions to consider here, above all whether or to what extent
Harris, Oliphant, and Randolph actually had contact with Druze or Sufi magi-
cians or mystics? In Harris’s case, it at first seems fairly clear that, because he
did not travel in the Middle East or make claims about the Druze, Nusairi, or
Sufi origins of his teachings, Harris was not much influenced by Islamic magical
or mystical traditions. Yet one wonders. There are aspects of his work that do
suggest Islamic resonances or parallels, if not outright origins. The organization
of his community resembles the organization of a Sufi tariqah (spiritual) path,
with himself as the shaykh. Furthermore, a major shaykh in Sufism is sometimes
termed the “pivot” or qutb, a title that Harris asserted for himself as the “pivotal
two-in-one.” Sufism tends toward lay orders and a kind of lay monasticism rather
similar to the organization of Harris’s groups. Harris’s secret teachings concern-
ing the “fay” or fairy spirits are parallel to some Islamic traditions concerning
jinn or djinn. Is it merely happenstance that Oliphant’s fictionalized depiction
of Harris and of Oliphant himself should have featured a Druze Shaykh and a
Middle Eastern setting?
Could Harris have come into contact with Druze or Sufi teachings or
traditions in England during his visit in 1860? Certainly it is highly unlikely that
he did, and so all these elements are simply striking parallels or coincidences.
After all, unlike Oliphant or Randolph, Harris left little reference to such Middle
186 Arthur Versluis

Eastern traditions in his own voluminous writings, and furthermore, we know

with certainty that much of his teaching derived from Swedenborg, from Andrew
Jackson Davis, from English/Scottish traditions concerning fairies, and other fairly
clearly Western or Western-esoteric sources. And yet one is left with linger-
ing questions that offer no easy answers. Oliphant had traveled extraordinarily
widely by the time he and his mother, Lady Oliphant, met Harris in England
in 1860—he had been all the way to Ceylon and Nepal.
But in Oliphant’s case, just as in Harris’s, there is no direct evidence linking
him to Druze or Sufi traditions during the formative years of his and Harris’s
esoteric teachings. It is true that Oliphant and his wife traveled to the Middle
East and settled in Palestine after their acrimonious separation from Harris and
the Brotherhood of the New Life. And it is undoubtedly also true that they
had personal contact with a wide variety of Muslims during this period. But
when we look more closely at Oliphant’s novel Masollam, we see there that the
esoteric teachings concerning men and women, and their spiritual union, come
primarily from the Westerner Santalba and are spoken to the Druze Shaykh. In
other words, the Middle Eastern setting serves as a kind of projection screen for
Oliphant’s Western esotericism, and the Druze Shaykh reflects it back to him,
thereby “confirming” it.
This brings us to Randolph. While Randolph claimed to have traveled
extensively in the Middle East, and furthermore to have received there essential
magical teachings from the Nusairi order, there is some reason to doubt this.
As Deveney points out, Randolph acknowledged in his book Eulis that he had
made up his connections not only to the Rosicrucians, but also to the Nusa’iri,
which he called “Ansairi.” He wrote:

Precisely so was it with things purporting to be Ansairetic. I had

merely read Lydde’s [sic] book, and got hold of a new name; and
again mankind hurrahed for the wonderful Ansaireh, but incontinently
turned up its nose at the supposed copyist. In proof of the truth of
these statements . . . the world is challenged to find a line of my
thought in the whole 4,000 books on Rosicrucianism . . . or in the
Ansairetic works, English, German, Syriac, or Arabic.30

Is it really likely that a tourist who did not speak traditional languages, let alone
dialects, in the course of a few months might have been so accepted into local
society that he was forthwith initiated into the most secret (sexual?) mysteries
of a heretical Sufi, Nusa’iri, or Druze order? It seems doubtful.
Let us look at some analogous cases. In the 1920s, another American
sojourner, William Seabrook, traveled in the Middle East and made it his goal
to meet Druze warriors and Yezidi “devil worshippers.”31 In a remarkable book,
Adventures in Arabia, filled with photographs and drawings and striking descrip-
 Literary “Masters” 187

tions, Seabrook tells of meeting Druze warriors and elders and of just how much
he could learn of their sacred ceremonies and teachings.32 Just as Randolph
claims he had done seventy years before, and just as Oliphant did when he
and his wife moved to Palestine, Seabrook was able to meet various dervishes,
Druze elders, and even Yezidis. But there is a difference between meeting or even
befriending members of various esoteric orders on the one hand, and actually
becoming an initiate on the other. Seabrook was only able to get so far—as an
adventurer, he could meet Druze elders or Yezidis, but as he tells us himself, he
was never admitted into initiatory traditions. I strongly suspect that exactly the
same is true of Oliphant, who after all remained Christian; thus by definition
he could not have been an initiate into Islamic esoteric traditions and, for that
matter, the same can be said of Randolph.
Randolph himself admits as much, when, in typically claiming that in his
visit to the Middle East he became “chief ” of the “mystic” “lofty brethren,” he
goes on to note how he became so, not by initiation or acceptance, but rather
by “suggestion” and “clues” into “labyrinths of knowledge [they] themselves did
not even suspect the existence of.”33 Deveney may be right in speculating that
Randolph did have direct contact with Sufis, and in particular with Nusa’iri;
but such contact is almost certainly not so much the origin of, as it was the
occasion for, Randolph’s complicated occult sexual philosophy, which ultimately is
more about Randolph himself and his own ideas about esoteric dimensions of
sexuality than it is about the traditions of Islam, Sufism, the Nusa’iri, or others.
And this is the larger conclusion that we inevitably come to when we
look at these figures together. There is a kind of genre here, or an archetype—
the Western occultist who travels to the Middle East and who finds there a
venue from which he can draw some elements in order to create an exotic
new esoteric synthesis. This esoteric syncretism is real—that is, there really may
be some elements of Islamic, Druze, Nusa’iri or other forms of Middle Eastern
esoteric traditions woven into these new syntheses that we see in the works of
Oliphant, Randolph, or for that matter, of much more recent esoteric adventur-
ers like Peter Lamborn Wilson, author of Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy, who
also traveled in Islamic esoteric and even heretical circles in Iran and elsewhere
in the Middle East. Each of these figures brought back the results of his travels
to incorporate them into his own esoteric sexual philosophy, whether in the
nineteenth or, as in Wilson’s case, in the late twentieth century.34
But it is somewhat difficult to understand figures like these if one does
not sufficiently recognize the role that syncretism plays more generally in the
history of religions. It is easy to assert that figures like Oliphant or Randolph
were simply “projecting” their own occultism onto Middle Eastern personae or
traditions. But although in some respects it is true, that is much too simplistic a
conclusion. It is too simplistic because it ignores the central role that syncretism
plays not only in Western esotericism, but also in the history of religions more
188 Arthur Versluis

generally. By the time of Randolph’s and Oliphant’s sojourns in the Middle

East, there had been considerable history of cultural cross-pollination. Numer-
ous books and articles had been published in England on the Druze, on the
Nusa’iri, on Islamic mysticism and magic, and there had been much commerce
and intellectual exchange between England and the Middle East. Such intel-
lectual cross-pollination inevitably resulted in what we might term “occult”
syncretism, and that is exactly what we see in nineteenth-century works like
those of Randolph and Oliphant.
Figures and authors like these two, and Harris, as well as later figures like
Wilson, are fascinating not least because they are themselves marginal or liminal
figures who represent not the authorities of a self-righteous orthodoxy, but rather
the “heretical” experimenters who exist on the margins of Christianity and Islam
alike, and who are far more likely than their orthodox counterparts to be open
to cross-cultural or religious syncretism or, even more likely, syncrasis—that is,
the absorption of practices from another tradition. Such figures are fascinating
because of their place on the margins, and because they are by nature intrepid
travelers and experimenters who are willing to cross not only physical borders,
but also intellectual and religious ones. In the lives and works of figures like
Oliphant and Randolph we see early forms of Islamic-Western esoteric synthesis
that continue to this day in later currents like the Traditionalist schools of René
Guénon and of Frithjof Schuon, as well as in works like those of Peter Lamborn
Wilson.35 Far from belonging only to their own day, nineteenth-century figures
like Oliphant and Randolph represent examples of larger syncretic or syncrasic
currents that clearly continue through the esoteric movements of the twentieth
century, and right on into our own time. It would be a mistake to dismiss
or ignore initiatory literature, for whatever we may conclude about particular
examples, it is nonetheless an important and fascinating religious phenomenon.

Notes

  1. Muhammed al-Da’mi and Daniel Walton, Arabian Mirrors and Western Soothsayers
(New York: Peter Lang, 2002).
 2. See Ibid., 176. Al-Da’mi was a professor at Baghdad University, prior to the
U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, and observations like the one quoted
here take on a certain poignancy in light of what subsequently was to happen. See also
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Routledge, 1978), and Covering Islam: How the Media
and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (New York: Pantheon, 1981).
 3. See, for instance, Mark Sedgwick’s Against the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004), a critical and somewhat limited overview of the Traditionalist
school of René Guénon and its offshoot, the school of Frithjof Schuon. Schuon presented
himself, and was regarded by followers, as the shaykh of a Sufi tariqah.
 4. Hannah Whitall Smith, Religious Fanaticism: Extracts from the Papers of Hannah
Whitall Smith, ed. Ray Strachey (London: Faber, 1928), 121.
 Literary “Masters” 189

  5. Herbert Wallace Schneider and George Lawton, A Prophet and a Pilgrim (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1942) 154, 199–200.
 6. Thomas Lake Harris, The Millennial Age: Twelve Discourses on the Spiritual and
Social Aspects of the Times (New York: New Church, 1860), 142.
  7. Thomas Lake Harris, The Arcana of Christianity, 2 vols. (New York: Brotherhood
of the New Life, 1867), and Thomas Lake Harris, The Breath of God With Man (New
York: Brotherhood, 1867).
 8. Swainson emphasizes the parallels with Böhme’s work, esp. 64 ff. W. P.
Swainson, Thomas Lake Harris and His Occult Teaching (London: William Rider & Son,
1922).
 9. Thomas Lake Harris, “The Children of Hymen,” in The Herald of Light: A
Monthly Journal of the Lord’s New Church (New York: New Church, 1859), II.307.
10. Smith, Religious Fanaticism, 219–28; see also Herbert Wallace Schneider, A Prophet
and a Pilgrim (New York, Columbia University Press, 1942), 534–60.
11. Schneider, A Prophet and a Pilgrim, 80.
12. By “Druze sheikh” he is referring to “Druze Shaykh.” Druze are originally an
esoteric sect of Shi`ites who now consider themselves to be an independent religion. A
Druze Shaykh would be a spiritual master in such an order.
13. Laurence Oliphant, Masollam: A Problem of the Period, (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1886),
II.123.
14. Ibid., II.128–29.
15. Ibid., II.130.
16. Ibid., II.130–31.
17. Ibid., I.253.
18. Ibid., II.111–12, where Sheikh Mohanna tells Santalba that he “now perceived,
what has been hidden from the faithful till now, that the ‘Eternal Word’ was twofold, mas-
culine and feminine, and the feminine principle was shown to me that I might understand
this, and I was further made aware that my apprehension of this truth would constitute
my deliverance.” He sees a female figure in blinding light, who places a warning finger on
her lips. His first experience “of intercourse with the gross and superficial beings in the
unseen world” “helped me to work wonders and perform acts of healing.” His “second
experience” was “of those profounder and subtler intelligences of a more nether sphere,
who delude men with the specious phraseology of occult science, and seek to draw them
away from the practice of true religion, by the substitution for it of esoteric dogmas.”
Now he perceived the “difference between the true and false” but found it “impossible
to describe,” to be “apprehended only by experience; and . . . as my people were not
yet ready to receive this truth, I must be silent in regard to it.”
19. Laurence Oliphant, The Land of Gilead (New York: Appleton, 1881), 319.
20. Ibid., 56–57.
21. See Michael Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Ameri-
can Muslims in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 249. It is
noteworthy that in the whole of Gomez’s book, there is no mention made of Randolph,
despite the prior publication of Deveney’s extensive analysis of Randolph’s work and sig-
nificance. This is a surprising oversight, to be sure, and probably is because of Randolph’s
“unsavory” sexual occultism.
22. John Patrick Deveney, Paschal Beverly Randolph: A Nineteenth-Century Black
American Spiritualist, Rosicrucian, and Sex Magician (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1997), 7–12, 13.
190 Arthur Versluis

23. One of the sources Randolph would have known was Silvestre de Sacy, Exposé
de la Religion des Druzes (Paris: L’Imprimerie Royale, 1838), II.559–86, “De la secte des
Nosaïris.” This may well have sparked Randolph’s interest, and it may be a partial basis
for his tales of the Ansairetic mysteries.
24. Deveney, Paschal Beverly Randolph, 146–47.
25. Ali Puli, Centrum Naturae Concentratum, trans. Edward Brice (London: J. Har-
ris, 1696).
26. See Paschal Beverly Randolph, The Wonderful Story of Ravelette (New York:
S. Tousey, 1863), which was subsequently translated and published in 1922 by none other
than Gustav Meyrinck, under the title Dhoula Bel.
27. Paschal Beverly Randolph, The New Mola! (Toledo: P. Randolph, 1873), 17–18.
See also Randolph, The Ansairetic Mystery (Toledo: Liberal Printing House, 1873), and
Eulis! (Toledo: Randolph, 1874).
28. See Maria de Naglowska, Magia Sexualis (Paris: Télin, 1931). There were numer-
ous subsequent editions of this work; it was on the shelf in Paris bookshops, readily
available in the 1990s.
29. The sexually charged rituals of groups like the Ordo Templi Orientis, and the
Fraternitas Saturni, certainly owe more than a little to the antecedent works of Randolph.
30. Deveney, Paschal Beverly Randolph, 216. Deveney is citing Paschal Beverly Ran-
dolph, Eulis (Toledo: Randolph Publishing, 1874), 47. “Lydde,” he notes, is Rev. Samuel
Lyde, author of The Anseyreeh and Ismaeleh: A Visit to the Secret Sects of Northern Syria
(London: Hurst & Blackett, 1853) and The Asian Mystery, Illustrated in the History, Religion,
and Present State of the Ansaireeh or Nusairis of Syria (London: Longman, Green, 1860).
31. Editor’s comment: Though Yezidi can roughly be translated as “devil worship-
ers,” their understanding of Iblis (Lucifer in Islam) is a gnostic concept. For them, Iblis
is the symbol of an angel who was the true lover of God and therefore did not betray
God by bowing to man. Some of the Sufi masters such as Ahmad Ghazzali have written
on in praise of Iblis. See Ahmad Ghazzali, Sawanih, in Majmu‘a-yi athar ahmad ghazzali
(Tehran University Press, 1370), 69–98.
32. See William Seabrook, Adventures in Arabia (New York: D. Appleton, 1928).
33. Deveney, Paschal Beverly Randolph, 217.
34. See Peter Lamborn Wilson, Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy (New York: Autono-
media, 1988). Wilson writes there that “the ‘facts’ in this book (and some fictions too,
perhaps) may prove of very little interest to students of Islam, and may in fact cause offense
to many Muslims. It can fairly be said that the book is not really ‘about’ Islam” (31).
35. See Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: The Secret Intellectual History of
the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford UP, 2004). As to Peter Lamborn Wilson, it is
worth noting that he spent some years in Iran, working with Traditionalists there in the
ambit of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, before branching out into his own line of what we may
call mystical anarchism under the pen name “Hakim Bey.” See, for example, his most
influential book Temporary Autonomous Zones (New York: Autonomedia, 1998 ed.). My
point here is that Traditionalism and its counterpart opposite in Wilson’s/Bey’s antino-
mianism both derive from Western-Islamic syntheses or syncrases.
 9

American Transcendentalists’
Interpretations of Sufism
Thoreau, Whitman, Longfellow, Lowell,
Melville, and Lafcadio Hearn1

John D. Yohannan

Emerson found in Persian literature boldness of expression and a valid ethi-

cal stance. He was about to import this fairly exotic foreign literature to the
New England scene in the mid-nineteenth century, not only because it was
harmonious with the prevailing ethical culture, but also because it pointed to a
transcendental realm beyond the pale negations of Unitarianism, where poetry
and religion, the secular and the sacred, were blended. Sa‘di provided a new
Bible for the world, and Hafiz was the Tongue of the Hidden. In this breadth
of literature the prudent Yankee might have both his hard nut and his blissful
orgy from one dispensation.
But Emerson’s own performance in appropriating this literature for Ameri-
can uses had been so formidable that it fairly preempted the field from followers.
Even those who were in conscious opposition to the sage’s philosophy—like
Longfellow, Lowell, and, in a different way, Melville—had to work in his shadow,
that is, so far as Oriental literature was concerned. The present chapter has to
do with Emerson’s disciples, or, at any rate, those who were in basic sympathy
with his Transcendentalist ideals.
Of these, Thoreau and Whitman had the largest individual endowments,
and were thus able to go on to an equal—if not, indeed, greater accomplish-
ment—in American literature. But in matters Oriental, they did not reach a
step beyond the areas already mapped out by their mentor. The lesser figures,
both of his own generation and that which followed, were content to restate
his devotion to Persian and other literature as a body of secular scriptures. They

191
192 John D. Yohannan

preached mush and produced little of their own. Though some of them presumed
to be scholars, they were not Oriental scholars, and their work was deficient in
accuracy. They did not even bother to demark Persian literature from that larger
corpus of writings that went by the vague name Oriental.
At Harvard College, Henry David Thoreau accepted the current prejudice
against Oriental exaggeration; he even thought that the title of Sa‘di’s Gulistan
or Flower-Garden was excessive. After he came to stay in Emerson’s home in
1841, however, his friend’s library reconciled him to Sa‘di and even whetted
his appetite for Confucius and the Bhagavad Gita. William E. Channing noted
that Thoreau liked to read the Hindus and Sa‘di, but that his interest was per-
sonal and superficial.2 This is a fair judgment; the object of study for Thoreau
was seldom the author of a book but usually the reader’s self is discovered in
a foreign work. In his Journal for March 23, 1842, Thoreau wrote that in Sa‘di
and the Arabian Nights and the Fables of Pilpay he found confirmation of his
relationship to nature and such of its creatures as moles and titmice. “I have
discovered more materials of Oriental history [in the New England noontide],”
he added, “than the Sanskrit contains or Sir William Jones has un­locked.”3 The
observations are a true measurement of his idiosyncratic approach to Persian
and other Oriental literature.
There was a fair amount of Oriental exaggeration in what Thoreau later
had to say about that literature. In A Week On the Concord and Merrimac Rivers,
he finds fault with the English (and the Germans too) for not knowing enough
about Persian and Indian literature although European literature grew up only
after the decline of the Persian. This is clearly a counsel of perfection, for he
had not read a great deal himself. To say, as he does, that “the reading which
I love best is the scriptures of the several nations, though it happens that I am
better acquainted with those of the Hindoos, the Chinese, and the Persians, than
those of the Hebrews which I have come to last,”4 is, on the face of it, untrue.
No matter how little he loved them, he had certainly come to the Hebrew
scriptures first. As for Persian scriptures, it is not clear what he was referring
to, unless, like Emerson, he had in mind the Gulistan as a sort of lay scripture.
Among the “Ethnical Scriptures” that were published from time to time
in the Dial, the short-lived journal of the Transcen­dentalists, the Confucian and
the Buddhist sections were edited by Thoreau in July 1842.5 His chief interest,
however, appears to have been in the Hindu writings, particularly the Bhagavad
Gita, and there is some justification for accepting his designation of himself as
a Yogi.6 But there is no justification whatsoever for the opinion of his early
biographers that his poem To the Maiden in the East has a Hafizian quality.7 The
passionate Hafiz is the remotest possible influence on Thoreau, and Persian poetry
in general plays a very minor part in his work.
When, in 1855, his English friend Thomas Cholmondeley sent him a col-
lection of about forty-five volumes of Orientalia, he does not appear to have made
 American Transcendentalists’ Interpretations of Sufism 193

much use of them. By then his interest in Oriental literature had considerably
diminished. But even earlier, his characteristic attitude toward these writings—or,
for that matter, any writings—was expressed in his defiant words: “I do not care
the least where I get my ideas, or what suggests them.”8 Thus the fraudulent
character of such books as the Desatir or the Chaldean Oracles did not interest
him, so long as they had provocative things to say. This obviously assured not
only that Thoreau would receive curious influences from his Persian readings, but
also that his conception of the Persian poets would bear the stamp of his own
prior bias. His taste was both more subjective and less catholic than Emerson’s.
The transcendental Week cites both Hafiz and Sa‘di in an inspirational vein:
“Yesterday at dawn God delivered me from all worldly affliction; and amidst
the gloom of night presented me with the water of immortality.”9 On Sa‘di
he observes: “In the Life of Sadi by Dowlat Shah occurs this sentence: ‘The
eagle of the immaterial soul of Sheikh Sadi shook from his plumage the dust
of his body.’ ”10 The more sociological Walden calls upon Sa‘di to testify on the
subject of philanthropy, one of Thoreau’s imperfect sympathies. “Do not stay
to be an overseer of the poor,” says Thoreau in a typical anti-do-good mood,
“but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world.” He then quotes
Sa‘di’s description of the cypress tree as azad, or free, since it is not subject to
the seasonal change of bloom and withering. It is, rather, always flourishing, like
the spiritual azads or indepen­dents. He concludes in Sa‘di’s words: “If thy hand
has plenty, be liberal as the date tree; but if it affords nothing to give away, be
azad.”11 The sentiment perfectly suited Thoreau’s notions about the inefficacy
of philanthropy; it is a good deal less typical of Sa‘di, and quite contrary to the
Islamic injunction on tithe-giving.
Thoreau’s feelings about Sa‘di and himself are best summed up in a Journal
entry for August 8, 1852:

The entertaining of a single thought of a certain elevation makes all

men of one religion . . . I know, for instance, that Sadi entertained
once identically the same thought that I do, and therefore I can find
no essential difference between Sadi and myself. He is not Persian,
he is not ancient, he is not strange to me. By the identity of his
thought with mine he still survives. . . . Sadi possessed no greater
privacy or individuality than is thrown open to me. . . . Truth and
a true man is essentially public, not private. If Sadi were to come
back to claim a personal identity with the historical Sadi, he would
find there were too many of us; he could not get a skin that would
contain us all. . . . By sympathy with Sadi I have embowelled him.
In his thought I have a sample of him, a slice from his core, which
makes it unimportant where certain bones which the thinker once
employed may lie.12
194 John D. Yohannan

In an age that was trying so hard to establish the identity of Persian literary
culture, this must have sounded perverse. In our own time, when historicity is
itself being questioned, it will no doubt recommend itself to many as a correct
view of reality.
In the light of the above, one might wonder what Thoreau meant when he
said that Walt Whitman was “wonderfully like the Orientals.”13 Or what Moncure
Daniel Conway meant when he spoke of Whitman’s “marvelous resem­blance not
only to Biblical but to ancient Persian poetry.”14 “Ancient” improperly describes
the Persian literature known to the West in the nineteenth century—hardly
anything produced before 1000 AD. Did Conway have in mind the erotic ele-
ment common to Whitman, Hafiz, and The Song of Songs? Or the folk wisdom
of the democratic bard matching the sententious­ ness of Sa‘di and the book
of Proverbs? Scholars have recently traced cogent analogies between Whitman
and the Bhagavad Gita or the Vedantic philosophy, but the affinity with Persian
poetry is difficult to see.
The question of whether Whitman had access to Persian poetry—even
at second hand, through Emerson—is complicated by his denial at one time
that he had read any, and his assertion at another time that he had.15 In “Song
of Myself ” there are the usual references to various ethnic scriptures (sections
41, 43). In the later “Passage to India,” these are more pronounced, and they
include mention, among the epics of the world, of Firdawsi’s Shah-Namah. In
still another poem, Whitman describes the howling and the whirling dervishes
that had already acquired a European notoriety, and he gives an accurate account
of the more sober worship of Orthodox Muslims:

I hear dervishes monotonously chanting, interspersed with frantic

shouts, as they spin around turning always to Mecca,
I see the rapt religious dances of the Persians and the Arabs . . .
I hear from the Mussulman mosque the muezzin calling,
I see the worshippers within, nor form nor sermon, argument nor
word,
But silent, strange, devout, raised, glowing heads, ecstatic faces.16

But there is nothing in all this to indicate a direct knowledge of the poetry
of Persia.
One would suppose that Sufism, with its pantheistic philoso­ phy, would
have had a special attraction for Whitman. There are indeed passages in “Song
of Myself ” which have the Sufistic ring, but it would be just as correct to relate
them to Hindu or indeed to European mysticism. A reader of Attar or Rumi
would understand perfectly the observation in section 48 of that poem: “In the
faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,” but there
is nothing in the poem or in the poet’s biography that explicitly connects this
line with the Sufi poets who expressed the same sentiment.
 American Transcendentalists’ Interpretations of Sufism 195

That Whitman later acquired some familiarity with Sufism is demonstrated

in a poem entitled “A Persian Lesson.” It is perhaps as precise a statement of
the pantheistic doctrine at the basis of Sufism as is to be found in such small
compass. It is here given in full:

For his o’erarching and last lesson, the greybeard Sufi,

In the fresh scent of the morning in the open air,
On the slope of a teeming Persian rose-garden,
Under an ancient chestnut-tree wide spreading its branches,
Spoke to the young priests and students.

Finally my children, to envelop each word, each part of the rest,

Allah is all, all, all—is immanent in every life and object,
May-be at many-a-more removes—yet Allah, Allah, Allah is there.

“Has the estray wandered far? Is the reason-why strangely hidden?

Would you sound below the restless ocean of the entire world?
Would you know the dissatisfaction? the urge and spur of every life;
The something never still’d—never entirely gone? the invisible
need of every seed?”

“It is the central urge in every atom,

(Often unconscious, often evil, and downtrodden,)
To return to its divine source and origin, however distant,
Latent the same in subject and object, without one exception.”17

Yet even here one has the feeling that the Persian lesson in Sufism has been
sieved through German idealistic philosophy, whose vocabulary it uses, rather
than poured straight from the tap of Islamic mysticism.
Equally disappointing is the encounter with Persian poetry of John Green-
leaf Whittier (1807–1892). His tolerance for Buddhist, Zoroastrian, and Islamic
writings probably derived more from his Quaker faith than from Emerson’s Tran-
scendentalism.18 We are told that Whittier once saw an Arab reading his Qur’an
and looking homesick while stationed with a circus in the town of Amesbury.
When Whittier spoke to him, the Arab was happy “to find a friend who had
also read his sacred book.”19 There is no doubt that the poet’s affection for the
rival faith was genuine, as evidenced in this sympathetic Islamic vignette in his
poem “The Star of Bethlehem”:

Each Moslem tomb and cypress old

Looked holy through the sunset air;
And, angel-like, the muezzin told
From tower and mosque the hour of prayer.20
196 John D. Yohannan

There is no evidence, however, of a more than superficial knowledge of Islamic

literature on Whittier’s part. (The same poem credits one of Shiraz’s two famous
poets with sowing thought “in the warm soil of Persian hearts.”) It is regret-
table—and in a sense inexplicable—that Whittier, who had more than an aver-
age capacity for mysticism, as evidenced by his more serious interest in Hindu
thought, did not respond to the challenge of Sufism. His treatment of Persian
themes was basically sentimental.
We turn next to four writers of lesser stature who were committed to the
Transcendentalist cultivation of Oriental litera­ture. Two of these were contem-
poraries of Emerson, two his followers in the succeeding generation.
The prominence given by Arthur E. Christy to Amos Bronson Alcott
(1799–1888) in The Orient in American Transcendentalism is probably only justified
by the affectionate regard which the quixotic teacher inspired in Emerson and
others who knew him. He thought of himself as a receiver of Emerson, and as
a reader of the biblical literatures of the world. His connection with the present
study is tangential to that abiding interest in his life.
Under the guidance of Emerson, Alcott began in 1849 to read the Bhaga-
vad Gita and to draw up a sort of Mankind Library that would include all the
scriptures of the world, a concept by now thoroughly laicized. Along with the
Qur’an, the Vedic writings, and the Confucian classics, Alcott listed both Sa‘di
and Firdawsi. When he had trouble obtaining Sa‘di’s writings at the Athenaeum,
he turned to the Harvard College Library or to the private collection of Henry
W. Longfellow. His diary revealingly describes Sa‘di as “a Persian Come-outer.”
When he had finally arranged a series of readings and discussions, the order of
the poets and philosophers was as follows, with Jesus a sort of pivotal figure:
Hermes Trismegistus, Zoroaster, Confucius, Sa‘di, Aeschylus, Pythagoras, Socrates,
Plato, Jesus, Dante, Behmen, Shakespeare, Milton, Swedenborg, and Goethe.21 This
was a veritable Great Books course with a strongly didactic accent on ethical cul-
ture. There is nothing to testify, however, that new insights were induced, or that
Persian poetry received any special elucidation, from the labors of Bronson Alcott.
If Alcott’s influence was felt mainly by those who came into personal
contact with him, that of William Rounesville Alger (1822–1905) was chiefly
communicated by his popular anthology The Poetry of the East, which was reis-
sued in 1865 as The Poetry of the Orient. The change of title betokened a change
of content in the wake of Emerson’s influential essay on Persian poetry. Alger
now alluded to Emerson in the lengthy Historical Dissertation which occupied
one-third of his book. Citing the instance when Sa‘di justified his idle existence
as a poet by comparing himself with a sweet-smelling rose, Alger added:

So our Concord Saadi sings, as if responding from today and America,

over the ages and the sea, to the dead lyrist of Persia: Tell them, dear,
if eyes were made for seeing, Beauty is its own excuse for being.22
 American Transcendentalists’ Interpretations of Sufism 197

So far as Persian literature was concerned, Alger ranged over pretty much
the same ground as Emerson had in his essay. His sources were mainly German,
and many of his selections simply translations of Tholuck, von Hammer, and
others. But he was also well informed on English periodical literature on the
subject—both the popular and the scholarly—and revealed a prodigious amount
of reading. Like Emerson, he testified to the universality of Persian poetry;
like him, too, he compared Hafiz (“the Bulbul of Shiraz”) with “The Swan of
Avon.” With von Hammer as guide, he traversed Persian literature: its images,
tropes, favorite themes, and the ideas of Sufism. Like a true Transcendentalist, he
stressed the Sufi’s denial of evil, his contempt for external religious forms, and the
ecstasy of his expression. He remarked on the “delicacy of sense . . . elsewhere
unparalleled” which is to be found in Persian poetry. His personal high regard
for it was manifest in the original poems which he mixed with his transla­tions
and adaptations, in tribute to the Persian poets. For example:

Sweet Hafiz is not dead, although his body turned

To dust in Eastern Shiraz centuries ago.
He lives and strikes the lyre which in his hand then burned:
This day his thoughts through Western nations sound and glow.23

Had Alger commanded a better poetic talent than this doggerel, he would have
been a formidable rival to Emerson in the introduction of Oriental poetry to
mid-nineteenth-century American readers.
The link between the first generation of Transcendentalists and the second
was supplied by Moncure Daniel Conway (1832–1907), who also linked the
American with the English devotees of Persian literature in the later nineteenth
century. His Sacred Anthology (Oriental): a Book of Ethnical Scriptures, published in
the 1870s, was apparently begun in the fifties.24 Going beyond Emerson and
Alcott, he stretched the term scripture to include, among the Persian poets, not
only Sa‘di and Hafiz but also the newly discovered Omar Khayyam. In fact,
Sa‘di excepted, the largest number of Persian quotations came from Khayyam.
However, although FitzGerald’s first edition was listed as a source, there was not
a single quatrain from this translation quoted in the book. Instead, the French
versions of Nicolas (which, it will be remembered, assumed a Sufistic interpre-
tation) were translated into rather literal English prose. This was an interesting
accommo­ dation, on Conway’s part, to his mixed reading audience of ethical
culturists and fin de siècle decadents.
Conway’s book was marred by mistakes that were inevitable in a work of
such ambitious dimensions. Quotations from Jalal al-Din Rumi were presented
under three different heads: Rumi, Maulavi Rumi, and Methnewi (Mathnawi).
Emerson’s versions were regarded as translations in the same sense as those
of Sir William Jones, even though twice removed from their Persian sources.
198 John D. Yohannan

­ evertheless, the book was useful in propagating the liberal religion of Tran-
N
scendentalism as it was beginning to merge back into the Unitarian Christian-
ity from which it had originally emerged. In the next decade, Charles D. B.
Mills’s anthology of Oriental literature would draw on not only Emerson and
the Germans but also on Conway’s book.25 By 1883, the Transcendentalist view
of Persian poetry had reached the West Coast. A contributor to the Overland
Monthly saw resemblances, he thought, between “emi­nently oriental” Hafiz and
such genuinely American authors as Emerson and Thoreau. Transcendentalism
and Persian poetry had come full circle.
A recent article, The Orient in Post-Bellum American Thought, calls our atten-
tion to a second generation Transcenden­talist whose work on world religions
showed a considerable knowledge of Persian literary culture.26 Samuel Johnson
(nei­ther, of course, the eighteenth-century writer nor the president of Columbia
University, but a left-wing Unitarian clergyman) never completed his three-
volume study of Oriental Religions and Their Relation to Universal Religion. The
first two volumes, on India and China, dealt with what Johnson called the
“cerebral” and the “muscular” type of mind in religion. The third volume, on
Persia, treated of the “nervous” mind, subsumed under Zoroastrianism and Islam.
The section on Islam was further broken down into chapters on “Mahomet”
and “The Shah-Nameh; or Book of Kings”; a third chapter was never written,
and one wonders whether it might not have dealt with the religious implica-
tions of Sufism.27
The chapter on the Shah-Namah shows considerable erudition in German
as well as English scholarship on the epic poem, which is brought into this book
on religion because of a monotheistic stress that Johnson finds in Firdawsi. Quite
apart from this purpose, however, considerable chunks of the story are provided
in Johnson’s own creditable English renditions of his German sources, some in
linear verse, some in prose. Johnson was much more scholarly than either Alger
or Conway, and it is to be regretted that he did not address himself to the
whole range of Persian literature.

Longfellow, Lowell, Melville, and Lafcadio Hearn

Although Emerson’s influence on the reading of Persian literature dominated

the American scene in the mid-century, it soon had to share that role with the
phenomenal translation, from abroad, of the Rub‘iyyat of Omar Khayyam. In
fact, it was the Americans who truly discovered FitzGerald’s poem. In the last
quarter of the century, the Rub‘iyyat became the stronger influence, and there
was soon very little difference between the American reader brought up on
the Transcendentalist view of Hafiz, and the English reader who inherited the
Cowell-FitzGerald bequest of Omar. Both groups were likely to have either
 American Transcendentalists’ Interpretations of Sufism 199

read Emerson or heard him lecture, and both had their copies of the Rub‘iyyat.
The Rev. Frederick R. Martin, an American Transcendentalist of the later era,
might believe that there was a real difference between the two points of view.
For him, Hafiz and Whitman were singers of themselves, an occupation which
he regarded as fundamentally healthy; Omar, on the other hand, was a victim
of Selbst-Schmerz or Welt-Schmerz, a spiritual malady to be guarded against.28
Yet, Emerson himself, on his transatlantic voyage of 1873, read and re-read
FitzGerald’s Rub‘iyyat and, according to Charles Eliot Norton, found it “very
lofty in its defiance.”29
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was hardly a Transcendentalist,
but like most of his American contemporaries, he took his first cue regarding
Persian literature from Emerson. An entry in his journals for 1849 (two years
after the publication of Emerson’s first translations from Hafiz,) notes that he
should go to the library for a book about Hafiz and also for Firdawsi’s Shah-
Namah. Two years later he confided that a friend had lent him German versions
of both Hafiz and Sa‘di. His Catholic taste in European literature was soon
further broadened to include the Asian. His library contained numerous books
dealing with the East, among them several anthologies of Oriental and Persian
poetry, an English version of the story of Leili and Majnoun, the Gulistan of
Sa‘di, FitzGerald’s Rub‘iyyat of course, and Chodzko’s book on the folk poetry
of Persia, from which both he and Emerson learned about the Persian Robin
Hood, Kurroglou.30
Longfellow’s poem “The Leap of Roushan Beg” is a good example of the
basically romantic interest which he had in the Orient, and the characteristically
didactic use which he made of Oriental material. Chodzko had introduced the
story thus:

The hero of the narrative of our work is Kurroglou, a Turkman Tuka,

a native of Northern Khorassan, who lived in the second half of the
seventeenth century. He rendered his name famous by plundering
the caravans on the great commercial road from Persia to Turkey,
between the cities of Khoi and Erzerum, and still more so by his
poetical improvisations.

Longfellow’s first stanza picks, chooses, and adds:

In the land that lies beyond

Erzeroum and Trebizond,
  Garden-girt his fortress stood;
Plundered khan, or caravan
Journeying north from Koordistan,
Gave him wealth and wine and food.31
200 John D. Yohannan

It was no matter that the journey should have been north to Kurdistan, and
place names were fair plunder for the poet. Although written in his seventieth
year, the poem displays Longfellow’s remarkable verve in narration, the story
coming to an exciting climax as Kurroglou’s renowned horse Kyrat leaps across
a thirty-foot precipice and takes the bandit out of his pursuers’ reach.
“The Spanish Jew’s Tale” from Tales of a Wayside Inn reveals something
more than a romantic interest in derring-do and exotic allusions to Ispahan
and Samarkand. It tells the story of how Azrael,32 appeared to the Rajah of
Hindostan as he visited with King Solomon at the latter’s great palace, how
the Rajah begged Solomon to use his magical power to transport him back
to Hindostan lest Azrael carry him away, and how the angel, seeing the Rajah
whisked off, grimly observed:

Thou hast done well in listening to his prayer;

I was upon my way to seek him there.33

Worthy of a place in Sa‘di’s Gulistan, by which it was undoubtedly inspired,

is Longfellow’s own parable on the transi­ency of royal power, “Haroun Al
Raschid”:34

One day Haroun Al Raschid read

A book wherein the poet said:—

“Where are the kings, and where the rest

Of those who once the world possessed?

“They’re gone with all their pomp and show,

They’re gone the way that thou shalt go.

“O thou who chosest for thy share

The World, and what the world calls fair,

“Take all that it can give or lend,

But know that death is at the end.”

Haroun Al Raschid bowed his head:

Tears fell upon the page he read.35

The poem “Keramos,” a potter’s song, owes its title and some of its philo-
sophical tone to the Kuzah-Namah or potter’s section of the Rub‘iyyat of Omar
Khayyam.36 Since the poem was composed in 1877, it may even be presumed to
participate in the debate over the Rub‘iyyat, then already raging. To some extent,
 American Transcendentalists’ Interpretations of Sufism 201

Longfellow, like Browning in Rabbi ben Ezra, attempts to refute the philosophy
of Omar Khayyam. Thus, one of the potter’s songs says:

Turn, turn, my wheel! This earthen jar

A touch can make, a touch can mar;
  And shall it to the Potter say,
What makest thou? Thou hast no hand?
As men who think to understand
A world by their Creator planned,
  Who wiser is than they.

Nevertheless, in its final refrain, there is a sort of concession to the melancholy

fact of life’s transience, a theme so persistent in the Ruba‘iyyat:

Stop, stop, my wheel! Too soon, too soon

The noon will be the afternoon,
  Too soon today be yesterday;
Behind us in our path we cast
The broken potsherds of the past,
And all are ground to dust at last,
  And trodden into clay!37

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) had both the scholar’s interest in and the
romantic poet’s inclination to some of the themes which that literature had
brought into the stream of English and American letters. His almost Byronic
affinity with the East is exemplified in his remarks, after visiting Constantinople:
“I like the Turks,” and after visiting Spain, “I like the Spaniards . . . they are
still Orientals.”38 His affection for Asian civilizations was extraordinary. He once
said that, although he had read Asian literature only in European translations, he
felt somehow “as if I had lived some former and forgotten life in the East.”39
He spoke praisefully of Firdawsi’s Shah-Namah and regretted that there was no
longer a large reading public interested in such works.40 He had something of
the well-read Englishman’s feeling for the colonial phase of British Orientalism,
yet his inability to understand Emerson’s mystical poem “Brahma” indicates that
there were perhaps decided limits to his sympathy with Oriental subjects.
In his essay on the English poet Spenser, Lowell wrote that the nationality
of a poet does not cut him off from the rest of the world but rather endears
him to it. “I can understand the nationality of Firdawsi when, looking sadly
back to the former glories of his country, he tells us that ‘the nightingale still
sings Old Persian.’ ”41 In the essay on Chaucer, again, he places the Shah-Namah
above most of the great romances of Europe: “In point of art they are far
below . . . Firdausi, whose great poem is precisely the romantic type.” Having
202 John D. Yohannan

quoted two passages from the French epic of Roland, he adds: “The episode of
Sohrab and Rustum (Rustam) as much surpasses the former of the passages just
alluded to in largeness and energy of treatment, in the true epical quality, as the
lament of Tehmine over her son does the latter of them in refined and natural
pathos.”42 It is clear from this reference that Lowell was not relying on Matthew
Arnold’s adaptation, which omits the mother’s lament, but on James Atkinson’s
translation, which includes it. This was a worthy display of literary scholarship
for the first president of the Modern Language Association.
Lowell wrote a number of his own poems in the Oriental manner. “Yous-
souf ” (Yusuf) is an interesting parable with an affecting moral. It tells the story,
so reminiscent of Sa‘di or Rumi, of how a stranger came to Youssouf ’s tent
and received generous hospitality only to reveal at the end that he is Ibrahim,
who slew Youssouf ’s son. In a moving conclusion to the poem, Youssouf trebles
the parting gift he has bestowed on the stranger saying that with him into the
desert goes his one black thought. Then, invoking his dead son, he cries: “Thou
art avenged, my first-born, sleep in peace.”43
Rumi’s notable parable about the friend who knocked on the door and
was sent away (when, in answer to the question “Who is there?” he replied “It
is I”) found a strange adaptation in Lowell’s thought. Rumi was of course dem-
onstrating the pantheis­tic Sufi doctrine that subject and object, man and God, I
and thou are one. Lowell cites the parable in his essay on democracy to prove
the principle (as enunciated by Theodore Parker), not that I am as good as you
are, but that you are as good as I am. Lowell relates the story thus:

A beautiful and profound parable of the Persian poet Jelalledden (Jalal

al-Din Rumi) tells us that “One knocked at the Beloved’s door, and
a voice from within asked ‘Who is there?’ and he answered ‘It is I.’
Then the voice said ‘This house will not open and hold me and
thee;’ and the door was not opened. Then went the lover into the
desert and fasted and prayed in solitude, and after a year returned
and knocked again at the door; and again the voice asked ‘Who is
there?’ and he said ‘It is thyself;’ and the door was opened to him.”44

Like Longfellow, Lowell lived in to the era of the fame of the Ruba‘iyyat
of Omar Khayyam, and his critical writings make frequent allusions to that poem.
In his own copy of the Ruba‘iyyat he wrote the following verses to his wife in
the measures of FitzGerald’s famed translation; they offer the typical fin de siècle
consolation of aesthetic satisfaction for the loss of religious faith:

These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred,

Each softly lucent as a rounded moon;
 American Transcendentalists’ Interpretations of Sufism 203

The diver Omar plucked them from their bed,

FitzGerald strung them on an English thread.

Fit rosary for a queen, in shape and hue,

When contemplation tells her pensive beads
Of mortal thought, forever old and new.
Fit for a queen? Why, surely then for you!

The moral? Where Doubt’s eddies toss and twirl

Faith’s slender shallop till her footing reel,
Plunge: if you find not peace beneath the whirl,
Groping, you may like Omar grasp a pearl.45

Lowell has unfortunately lost some of the music of his model by leaving
unrhymed the second rather than the third line of the stanza. But it was a
tribute to the most significant new force in Persian poetry in America since
the heyday of Transcendentalism.
Herman Melville (1819–1891) was both disciple to and apostate from
Emerson. In part the apostasy was of course due to temperament, but in part
simply to chronology: the oracles of self-reliance did not have as authentic a ring
in Melville’s late reading of them as they had had when Emerson first uttered
them. Melville could therefore annotate Emerson’s essays with both admiration
and cynicism when they counseled that all was well and wisely put. The rem-
edies of Transcendentalism were a mixed bag for the new age; they attracted
and repelled. For that matter, Emerson himself had turned with a sense of relief
to the sober realism of Sa‘di’s Gulistan after the Transcendentalist feast of moon
and stars. For Melville too there would be a therapy in that book.
He appears to have begun with the standard images of the Persian poets—
those long since established by Sir William Jones and very recently refined by
Cowell and Emerson. In Mardi, first published in 1849, Hafiz is the Persian
Anacreon, yet the reference to him is couched in language so reminiscent of
Emerson that one is forced to the conclusion that Melville was recalling his
predecessor’s famous verses on Shakespeare and Hafiz. In the chapter “Dreams”
the digression on writing style reads:

Like a grand ground-swell, Homer’s old organ rolls its vast volumes
under the light frothy wave-crests of Anacreon and Hafiz; and high
over my ocean, sweet Shakespeare soars, like all the larks of spring.46

It is notable, however, that, whereas Emerson had coupled Hafiz and Shakespeare,
Melville separates them; for him, obviously, Shakespeare had already begun to
have a unique significance.
204 John D. Yohannan

In these early years of his literary career, Melville’s acquaintance with Ori-
ental literature appears to have been most superficial.47 Whatever his knowledge
of Persian poetry, in Pierre he reiterated the same standard notions about Hafiz
that he had earlier accepted in Mardi. The hero, commenting on Young America
in Litera­ture, asks:

What could Pierre write of his own on Love or anything else, that
would surpass what divine Hafiz wrote so many long centuries ago?
Was there not Anacreon too, and Catullus and Ovid—all translated
and readily accessible?48

There is no question about the accessibility of any of the above authors to mid-
century American readers. What is to question, with regard to Hafiz at any rate,
is whether he had yet been presented in a way acceptable to the age. The Hafiz
that Melville’s Pierre was familiar with was a rather stereotypical one.
Melville nevertheless became seriously involved in the problem of the
meaning of Hafiz’s wine—as Emerson had been, reasoning circuitously that it
stood for all that it symbolized. In The Confidence Man, Melville permits Francis
Goodman to address the following panegyric on wine to Charles A. Noble,
cosmopolitan:

The lyre and the vine forever! . . . The vine, the vine! is it not the
most graceful and bounteous of all growths? And by its being such,
is not something meant? As I live, a vine, a Catawba vine, shall be
planted on my grave.

But later, when the cosmopolitan is speaking with a mystic, the latter is permit-
ted to have his say on the subject:

But as for the wine, my regard for that beverage is so extreme, and I
am so fearful of letting it sate me, that I keep my love for it in the
lasting condition of an untried abstraction. Briefly, I quaff immense
draughts of wine from the page of Hafiz but wine from a cup I
seldom as much as sip.49

In a book that has been construed as a satirical jibe at Emerson’s Transcen-

dentalism, it would be easy to take this as a rejection of the extremely quintes-
sential—to use a term Melville himself later employed satirically—character of
Transcendentalist thought. W. R. Alger, for example, whose anthology was in
Melville’s library, separated the wine of Hafiz completely from the vine. Melville
was to return later in life to the imagery of Persian poetry, but meanwhile he
found no more could be done with a merely Anacreontic Hafiz than had already
 American Transcendentalists’ Interpretations of Sufism 205

been done. Like many another poet of the mid-century, Melville was at a sort
of spiritual dead end. Emerson’s Hafiz was no help. Sustenance was to come,
however, from two other Persian poets.
In 1868 Melville acquired Sa‘di’s Gulistan in Gladwin’s transla­tion (though
not the 1865 edition, for which Emerson had written an introduction). In the
next decade, he possessed three different editions of Omar Khayyam’s Ruba‘iyyat.50
When, in the language of the English Victorians, he referred to Omar as “that
sublime old infidel,” and described his poem as “the irreligion of thinking men,”
it was apparent that his readings in Persian poetry had taken a new bent.51
Melville’s copy of the Gulistan shows markings that tell us as much about
the American owner as about the Persian author. Heavy underscorings and
multiple marginal lines call attention not only to the well-known parables and
apothegms of Sa‘di, but also to less familiar ones which suited the reader’s cyni-
cal mood at the time, such as:

Tranquility of mind requires a fixed income.

or,

In a season of scarcity and drought inquire not of a distressed Dur-

waish (Darwish) how he does, unless you mean to apply ointment
to his wound by giving him suste­nance.

or,

And the sages have declared that falsehood mixed with good advice
is preferable to truth tending to excite strife.52

The last of these looks interestingly forward to Billy Budd, into which the mes-
sage of the inutility of unmixed good has been read.
It may well be, as Dorothee M. Finkelstein asserts in her book on Mel-
ville’s Oriental interests, that his Eastern journey to the Holy Land was but an
affirmation of his Western heritage. Nevertheless, the Eastern poets play a role
in the dialectical discussions of Clarel. In a recitative from Part III (Mar Sabe),
the poet Hafiz is allowed to respond to an inquiry regarding the relevancy of
his wine and roses to the world as it is:

To Hafiz in grape arbor comes

Didymus with book he thumbs:
My lord Hafiz, priest of bowers—
Flowers in such a world as ours?
206 John D. Yohannan

Who is the god of all these flowers?—

  Signor Didymus, who knows?
None the less, I take repose—
Believe and worship here with wine
In vaulted chapel of the vine
Before the altar of the rose.53

The Hafizian joy is, to say the least, here on the defensive. Part IV of
Clarel (Bethlehem) contains an even less blithe “Persian rhyme,” composed, it is
said, by “An Asian man” (“strange lore was his and Sadi’s wit”). It describes the
dying of the ancient Zoroastrian fires in lines worthy of the apocalyptic visions
of William Butler Yeats. The poem ends:

The rule, the Magian rule is run,

And Mithra abdicates the sun.54

This sense of the running out of time and of a cycle of civilization was a
strong undercurrent in the melancholy quatrains of Omar Khayyam, and it was
that which recommended them so strongly to readers of the fin de siècle. Of
these Melville must be counted as one. This is manifest in both the prose and
the poetry which he wrote in the last decade or so of his life, much of it left
behind in manuscript form.
An example is the story Under the Rose, which is described in an epigraph
as “Being an extract from an old manuscript entitled ‘Travels in Persia (Iran) by
a Servant of My Lord the Ambassa­dor.’ ” The epigraph is of course a spoof, for
the work is Melville’s own fabrication. It represents perhaps his recollection of
James Morier’s fiction as well as the poetry of Hafiz, Sa‘di, and Omar Khayyam,
with which he was by now on fairly good terms.
He had apparently been impressed by the illustrations for the Ruba‘iyyat
of Omar Khayyam made by the American artist Elihu Vedder, whose Pre-
Raphaelitish manner of both literal and metaphysical interpretation had a large
appeal for the late Victorians. Into his story Under the Rose, Melville imported a
Vedder-like scene carved on an amber vase; it depicted in relief an angel with
a spade (like a gardener) and another angel with a wine jar on his shoulder
(like a cellarer), both walking toward a small Job-like character standing near
a sepulcher. The vase and its figure had tempted the court poet (called in
the Persian manner “Sugar-lips”) to indite some verses which must now be
translated from the Persian language by a renegade Greek. The latter demands
wine before rendering his services because, as he says, “this same Sugar-lips’
verses being all grapes, or veritably saturated with the ripe juice thereof, there
is no properly rendering them without a cup or two of the same.” After five
drinks, “swaying his body like the dervishes hereabouts,” he translates the verses,
 American Transcendentalists’ Interpretations of Sufism 207

which have the mordant tone of Khayyam’s more cynical quatrains and end
on a line that alludes directly to one of Khayyam’s stanzas: “And here comes
the jolly angel with the jar!”55
Before concluding whether all this tends in Melville’s biographia literaria, we
must look at two late Miscellaneous Poems which Melville apparently consigned
to the wasteland by his subtitle for them: “Weeds and Wildings Chiefly: with
a Rose or Two.” The first of these, called “The New Rosicrucians,” is very
much in the style of Emerson’s “Ghazelle” of the 1847 volume, the second of
his translations from Hafiz. It expresses a similar impatience with sanctimonious
condemnation of those given to a sybaritic life:

To us disciples of the Order

Whose Rose-vine twines the Cross,
Who have drained the Rose’s chalice
Never heeding gain or loss;
For all the preacher’s din
There is no mortal sin—
No—none to us but Malice.

Exempt from that, in blest recline

We let life’s billows toss;
If sorrow come, anew we twine
The Rose-vine round the Cross.56

The substitution of rose-vine for grape-vine does not materially affect the thrust
of the poem.
The second poem, entitled “The Rose Farmer,” tells of a man who has
come into possession of a large rose-garden but doesn’t know whether he should
reap a harvest of roses or distill them into a small but concentrated amount
of Attar. A Persian gentleman ­ rose-farmer advises him to prefer the roses to
the perfume, at which all the roses in the garden nod their heads in glee in a
manner often depicted by Hafiz and found so delightful by both Emerson and
Tennyson. The poem continues:

Discreet in second thought’s immersion

I wended from this prosperous Persian
Who, verily, seemed in life rewarded
For sapient prudence not amiss,
Nor Transcendental essence hoarded
In hope of quintessential bliss:
No, never with painstaking throes,
Essays to crystallize the rose.57
208 John D. Yohannan

Melville’s ambivalent attitude toward Emerson and the Trans­cendentalists

is well illustrated in the above poems. He obviously could not countenance a
metaphysical view of the materials of Persian poetry, whether rose-vine or grape-
vine. He would not, “in hope of quintessential bliss,” attempt “to crystallize the
rose.” He might accept help from Emerson in attacking the “unco guid,” but
the conversion of Persian hedonism into a “spiritual carpe diem” was another
matter. In the then current tendency to polarize Persian poetry, so that Hafiz
symbolized the Transcendentalist view and Omar Khayyam the view of the
decadence, Melville was apparently pulled more strongly in the latter direction.
In a late poem called “Hearts-of-Gold,” he sought to take even Hafiz away
from the Transcendentalists, although that meant, in effect, that he would have
to fall back on the old Anacreontic view which regarded the wine of Hafiz as
indeed Moore’s Best Port.

’Twere pity, if true,

What the pewterer said ­
Hearts of gold be few.
Howbeit, when snug in my bed,
And the firelight flickers and yellows,
I dream of the hearts-of-gold sped—
The Falernian fellows—
Hafiz and Horace,
And Beranger—all
Dextrous tumblers eluding the Fall,
Fled? can be sped?
But the marigold morris
Is danced o’er their head;
And their memory mellows,
Embalmed and becharmed,
Hearts-of-gold and good fellows!58

It is a pity that Melville did not include in this company Omar Khayyam, who
had so well depicted the “marigold morris” danced over the heads of so many
who had gone before.
More distinctly a writer of the late nineteenth-century Euro­pean deca-
dence was Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904), but he was at the same time unusually
responsive to the Transcendentalist interest in Oriental literature as a form of
scripture. Exotic almost by birth, Hearn was the son of Irish and Greek parents;
transported from Greece to Ireland, he later migrated to America, whence he
went to Japan in 1890. There he married a native woman, assumed a Japanese
name and Japanese citizenship, and died and was buried. But it was in America
 American Transcendentalists’ Interpretations of Sufism 209

that he did the most considerable part of his writing, and it was there that he
made his first contributions to the study of Asian literature.59
The poetry of Persia, and the lore of Islam generally, had a high place in
his esteem. Although he had no knowledge of Near Eastern languages, he made
excellent use of his command of French to gain access to the translations of
Persian classics not yet available in English. So fascinated was he by the sound
of Eastern words that he retained them in transliteration in his popular adapta-
tions, which were often rejected by newspaper and maga­zine editors who saw
no reading audience for such exotica.
Reading in the Gulistan the story of Bilal, the first muezzin (Moazzin),60
Hearn became enamored of the muezzin’s call to prayer, and sought to obtain
from London the musical notations that would render its sounds. Later, he was
taken up with the idea of writing about the music of the howling dervishes.
Into a volume called Stray Leaves from Strange Literatures—which also contained
Indian, Talmudic, Egyptian, and Finnish excerpts—went his versions of passages
from The Lights of Canopus (a Persian variant of the Pilpay fables), the Gulistan,
and the Mantiq al-tayr or Bird-Parliament.
While employed as a newspaper man by the Times-Democrat of New
Orleans, Hearn wrote a number of unsigned articles, since collected, that show
his steady interest in the literature of Asia. It was his hope that through the
study of world literature people would eventually come to a “future universal
religion.” This concept of a syncretic world faith was probably inspired by Sir
Edwin Arnold’s sympathetic studies of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. Always
susceptible to what lay between the sentimental and the mystical, he marveled
at the mastery of death implied in Rumi’s bold lines:

I am the mote in the sun-beam, and I am the burning sun;

“Rest here,” I whisper the atom; I call to the orb: “Roll on!”61

Hearn wondered if Occidental man would ever learn this secret.

In another article he praised the Shah-Namah (which he much preferred
to Matthew Arnold’s adaptation of a portion of it), and thought the cost of
$150 for a set of Jules Mohl’s French translations of the epic well worth it.
This poem had proved, he said, that chivalry had existed in Persia long before
it appeared in Europe. With more good will than political realism, he urged
that the cultivation of this and other Oriental books would sooner bring about
universal brotherhood than would commerce.
Hearn’s course of lectures at the University of Tokyo in the years 1896–1902
have come down through the notes taken by interested students. One lecture
was on FitzGerald’s Ruba‘iyyat, which he considered the supreme manifestation
of Orientalism in English literature. For his Japanese students he underscored
210 John D. Yohannan

the similarity between Omar’s ideas of the impermanency of life and Buddhist
notions already familiar to them; and with perhaps no more license than many
other interpreters took, he suggested that the Ruba‘iyyat form was not unlike the
Japanese tanka or thirty-one syllable poem.62 In the light of his large service to
the popularization of Japanese literature, his devotion to Persian poetry—however
slight—deserves to be recorded.

Notes

  1. This section has been adapted from John D. Yohannan, Persian Poetry in England
and America: A 200-Year History (New York: Caravan Press, 1977), 135–284.
  2. William E. Channing, Thoreau the Poet-Naturalist (Boston: Goodspeed, 1902), 50.
 3. Henry David Thoreau, Writings of Henry David Thoreau ed. Bradford Torrey
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), VII, 344.
 4. Ibid., I, 72, 148–49, and 415.
 5. For Thoreau’s contributions to the Dial, see Clarence Gohdes, The Periodicals
of American Transcendentalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1931).
  6. See Sreekrishna Sarma, “A Short Study of the Oriental Influences upon Henry
David Thoreau with Special Reference to his Walden,” Jahrbuch für Amerikastudian (Hei-
delberg, 1956), 76–92.
 7. F. B. Sanborn, Henry D. Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895), 163.
  8. Henry David Thoreau, Journal, ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1906), VIII, 135 (Jan. 23, 1856).
 9. Poem by Hafiz.
10. Thoreau, Writings, I, 415. See also 70, 80 of same volume.
11. Ibid., II, 87–88.
12. Thoreau, Journal, IV, 290 (August 8, 1852).
13. Gay Wilson Allen, Walt Whitman Handbook (Chicago: Packard & Co.,1946),
457–58.
14. Moncure Daniel Conway, “Walt Whitman,” Fortnightly Review, VI (Oct. 15,
1866), 538 ff.
15. See Allen, Whitman Handbook, who cites Lord Strangford’s comparison of Whit-
man with Rumi.
16. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Comprehensive Reader’s Edition, ed. Harold
W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley (New York: NYU Press, 1965), “Proud Music,” 408.
17. Ibid., 553.
18. Arthur Christy, “Orientalism in New England: Whittier,” American Literature, I
(January 1930), 372.
19. Arthur Christy, “The Orientalism in New England: Whittier,” in ibid., V
(November 1933), 247.
20. John G. Whittier, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Horace E. Scudder (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1894), 416.
21. Christy, The Orient in American Transcendentalism, 246.
22. William R. Alger, Poetry of the Orient (Boston: Roberts Brothers Press., 1865), 78.
 American Transcendentalists’ Interpretations of Sufism 211

23. Ibid., 147.

24. Moncure Daniel Conway, Sacred Anthology (Oriental): a Book of Ethical Scripture,
5th ed. (New York: Henry Holt, 1877), esp. “Preface,” vi–vii.
25. Charles D. B. Mills, Pebbles, Pearls and Gems of the Orient (Boston: G. H. Ellis,
1882).
26. Carl T. Jackson, “The Orient in Post-Bellum American Thought,” American
Quarterly 22 (Spring 1970): 67–81.
27. Samuel Johnson, Oriental Religions and Their Relations to Universal Religions (Bos-
ton: Houghton Mifflin, 1885), vol. III, “Persia.” A contemporary of Johnson’s, James Free-
man Clarke, used his knowledge of verses in creditable English (James Freeman Clarke and
L. Clarke, Exotics: An attempt to Domesticate Them, [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1875, 1876]).
28. Frederick R. Marvin, The Companionship of Books (New York: Putnam’s Sons,
1906). See also his Poems and Translations (Boston: Sherman, French & Co., 1914), passim.
29. Christy, The Orient, 316.
30. An account of Longfellow’s Oriental library is given by Arthur Christy, The
Orient, 321–23.
31. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Leap of Roushan Beg, facsimile of the original
manuscript, ed. Arthur Christy (New York: William Rudge,1931), 9, 35.
32. The Islamic angel of death, best known in Jalal al-Din Rumi’s famous parable
on the inevitability of fate.
33. Horace E. Scudder, ed., The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfel-
low (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1893), 264.
34. Harun al-Rashid.
35. Ibid., 339.
36. It is not clear to which section is the author referring to since there is no
specific section in the Rub‘iyyat known as Kuzah-Namah or potter’s section. (Editor)
37. Ibid., 329–33.
38. James Russell Lowell, Letters of James Russell Lowell, ed. Charles E. Norton (New
York: Harper, 1894), vol. II, 222.
39. Ibid., 234.
40. James Russell Lowell, “Fragments of an Unfinished Poem,” Complete Writings,
Elmwood edition. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), XII, 123.
41. Ibid., IV, 227.
42. Ibid., II, 205.
43. Ibid., XII, 246.
44. Ibid., VII, 18.
45. Ibid., XIII, 132. Other references to the Ruba‘iyyat are to be found in II, 320;
VII, 86 and 316; and VIII, 275.
46. Herman Melville, The Works of Herman Melville, Standard ed. (New York: Russell
and Russell, 1963), vol. IV, Mardi, Chap. 15, 53–54.
47. The chief treatment of Melville’s Orientalism is by Dorothee M. Finkelstein,
Melville’s Orienda (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961). Although she tends to make
more of Melville’s use of Persian poetry than it will stand, with her main conclusions
I am in agreement. Another instance of this reading too much into Melville is Eleanor
M. Tilton’s interpretation of Melville’s story “Rammon” in Harvard Library Bulletin, 13.1
(Winter 1959): 5–91.
212 John D. Yohannan

48. Herman Melville, The Works, Vol. IX, Pierre, p. 350.

49. Herman Melville, The Confidence Man (New York: Grove Press, 1949), 199, 224.
50. For Melville’s readings, see Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Melville’s Readings: a Check-
List of Books Owned and Borrowed (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), esp.
60, 83, and 89.
51. Herman Melville, The Letters of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell R. Davis and Wil-
liam H. Gilman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 276, 282.
52. Musle-Huddeen Shaik Sady of Sheeraz, The Gulistan or Rose-Garden, trans.
Frances Gladwin (London: Kingsbury, Parbury & Allen, 1822), copy in Beinecke Library,
Yale University, 2, 249, 284.
53. Herman Melville, Works, vol. XV, Clarel, Sect. 13, 66.
54. Ibid., Part 4, “The Convent Roof,” Sect. 16, 226–27.
55. Ibid., vol. XIII, “Under the Rose,” 344. The FitzGerald quatrain alluded to is
number 58 of the Fourth Edition.
56. Ibid., vol. XVI, 337.
57. Ibid., 348.
58. Ibid., 428.
59. The chief source of information about Hearn has been Elizabeth Bisland, The
Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), esp. vol. 1.
60. A Moazzin is responsible for maintaining the prayer schedule of a mosque by
both leading and reciting the call to prayer. Bilal the first, was chosen by Mohammad
himself.
61. Lafcadio Hearn, Stray Leaves from Strange Literatures (Houghton Mifflin, Boston:
1922). The collections from the Times-Democrat were issued under the title Essays in
European and Oriental Literature (New York: Dodd Mead, 1923).
62. Lafcadio Hearn, Interpretations of Literature, ed. John Erskine, 2 vols. (New York:
Dodd Mead, 1929).
 10

The Persians of Concord1

Phillip N. Edmondson

By the late 1840s, in the literary community of Concord, Massachusetts, fasci-

nation with sensual, spiritual, and psychological themes had converged to bring
about an attraction to the Classical Persian poetry of Sa‘di, Firdawsi, Hafiz, and
Nazami. Celebrating the spiritual qualities and creative energy of the Persian
poets and their characters, the Concord writers assumed these Eastern mystical
personas entering their poetic realms or transferring them to a New England
setting. Evidence of this influence can be found in the works and journals
of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry
David Thoreau, as well as George William Curtis. From the Sufi poets and their
characterizations, these American writers fashioned their ideal poet; furthermore,
their literary inquiry into the psychology of artistic creativity equated a Persian
feminine divinity with the creative force driving the poetic spirit.
For American readers, the tales of the Islamic East conjured up romantic
images of an occult and exotic psychic space of vivid enchantment and hidden
truths. As in Europe, the Arabian Nights had become popular family reading by the
mid-nineteenth century. This book was so popular that from 1803 to 1833 there
were thirty-three editions and reprints.2 One major Concord writer, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, in images inspired by the Arabian Nights, describes his search for
the secrets of the unconscious. His son Julian recounts that his father told him:

There lingers in me superstitious reverence for literature of all kinds.

A bound volume has a charm to my eyes similar to what scraps of
manuscripts possess for the Mussulman. Every new book or antique
one may contain the Open Sesame, the spell to disclose treasures
hidden in some unsuspected cave of truth.3

213
214 Phillip N. Edmondson

The popular culture of this period reveals the impact of the Islamic East
on Concord. A retrospective of the period in the Eclectic Magazine aptly reported
that Concord had become the “mecca” of Transcendentalism.4 This account also
characterized Margaret Fuller at Brook Farm as an Eastern-like mystic, replete
with charms, a fortune-teller of faces. Descriptions of Islamic costumes, which
the Brook Farm residents wore at masquerade picnics, indicate the presence of
the exotic East in their imaginations.5 Even the sponsors of this experimental
community appeared at dress balls costumed as dervishes.6 Indeed, this New
England “mecca” opened its portals to the sensuality and mystery of the Islamic
East to welcome liberating forms of literary self-expression.
Following the interest of the English and German artists in Oriental litera-
ture and Naturphilosophie, the Concordians turned to the Persian mystical poets
for a rich new source of imagery and symbols to express their own literary
purposes.7 The Oriental Translation Fund, a British-sponsored Asiatic society,
supplied scholarly information to American journals such as the Knickerbocker
and the American Monthly Magazine. The society’s most valued contributions were
translations of Persian poetry. For example, Sir William Jones, an eighteenth-
century Orientalist and linguist, provided Europe and America with the first
reliable translations of Sufi poetry by the two great Persian mystics, Hafiz and
Rumi.8 J. A. Atkinson, Esq. and his son James translated two great epic poems,
Shah-Namah by Firdawsi and Laili and Majnun by Nazami.
These publications made their way into the homes of Concord’s writers.
Among various English sources, Longfellow’s library included Atkinson’s transla-
tions of Nazami’s classic, Laili and Majnun, significant for its characters and theme
of the lover-Beloved relationship.9 Majnun, the love-sick madman, rejects reason to
wander the desert in search of his beloved Laila. The pain of separation from Laila
causes Majnun to transform her into a beautiful, bewitching, feminine force that
represents God. At the same time, the pain annihilates Majnun’s attributes until he
has abandoned himself for love. In considering the impact of Persian literature on
mid-nineteenth-century American literature, this epic love story by Nazami proved
to be as significant as the poetry of either Sa‘di or Hafiz since the Concordian
writers transformed Majnun into the questing poet and Laila into his creative force.
A second Persian poetic source in Longfellow’s private collection was the
first popular English anthology of Persian verse, The Rose Garden of Persia by
Louisa S. Costello.10 Though not published by the Oriental Fund, Costello must
have drawn heavily from the research accumulated by this British Orientalist
society. Her anthology, reviewed at length in the Westminster Review, assumes
that its readership is rather well acquainted with the major Persian poets and
their works.11
The contributions of the German Orientalists, particularly in the work of
Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, equaled if not surpassed the influence of English
sources. The prominent German Orientalist sent a copy of his translations to
 The Persians of Concord 215

Emerson, who undoubtedly spirited this flurry of interest in Persian poetry

among Concordians through his English translations.12 Some 700 lines of poetry
appear in Emerson’s journals and works from Sa‘di, Hafiz, Nazami, and Anwari.13
Theodore Parker, a Brook Farm teacher, listed among his collection of mystical
and religious works a Persian anthology published in 1817 and von Hammer-
Purgstall’s translations of Hafiz and other major poets.14
Throughout the decade of the 1840s, journals and letters by this close
community of writers and intellectuals disclose an ever-increasing attraction to
Persian mystical poetry, based on the various sources which they shared. Margaret
Fuller’s letter on February 23, 1840 to Emerson on the Shah-Namah by Firdawsi
marks one of the earliest exchanges. She relates this epic to Emerson in personal
terms by seeing herself as a thirsty wanderer in the desert reminiscent of the
Persian character Majnun in Nazami’s classic. Fuller describes this wanderer as
a “gentle-hearted, religious man” who prefers his quest to the comfort of the
oasis.15 Alcott mentioned in his journal entry of February 11, 1851 that the
Boston Athenaeum had no information on the Persian poet Sa‘di, so he had
to rely on the Harvard College Library and on Longfellow.16 Longfellow also
noted in his journal entry of August 30, 1849, that he wanted to borrow a work
on Hafiz from the Harvard College Library.17 On August 13, 1851, Longfellow
wrote in his journal that George Curtis had lent him Daumer’s translation of
Hafiz and Graf ’s translation of Sa‘di’s Rose Garden.18
Part of the reason for the interest of the Germans and the Concord writers
in Persian literature was, undoubtedly, the fact that both groups had embraced
a concept of artistic creativity prevalent in German Romanticism at the time, a
concept of submission similar to the master-disciple relationship in Sufism. Haw-
thorne, for example, shared with his fellow writers the belief of the Germans that
real artists had to submit to the divine force, as self-effaced vessels.19 Although
all human beings possess the creative spirit, its development depends on the
observance of certain conditions, according to Hawthorne. First, the artist must
gain the “soul’s eyesight” through simple faith in Reality.20 Creative imagination
combines with this instinctive perception to bring about discernment of Reality,
of which Nature is a shadow. The subordinate role of reason is to understand
the heart’s knowledge, which emanates from this instinctive perception.21
So great was this influence that Emerson based his ideal poet and muse on
Persian sources. He first identified himself with one of Persia’s greatest poets in
his autobiographical poem entitled “Saadi,” first published in the Dial in 1842.
Sa‘di appealed to Emerson so much that numerous references to him appear in
the Transcendentalist leader’s poems. Later, Emerson changed the name Saadi to
Seyed to identify his poet as a wandering dervish with a crystal soul in harmony
with Nature.22
Thoreau best expressed his own identification, as well as that of the Con-
cord community, with this poet in these terms:
216 Phillip N. Edmondson

I know, for instance, that Saadi entertained once identically the same
thought that I do, and thereafter I can find no essential difference
between Saadi and myself. He is not Persian, he is not ancient, he
is not strange to me. By the identity of his thoughts with mine, he
remains alive.23

Thoreau continues to express the Concordian identification with Sa‘di:

If Saadi were to come back to claim a personal identity with the

historical Saadi, he would find that there were too many of us; he
could not get a skin to contain us all . . . By sympathy with Saadi
I have embowelled him.24

Just as Emerson identified his ideal poet with Sa‘di, so did he associate
the Orient and Nazami’s Lilla (Laila) with the feminine force:

Was it Hafiz or Firdousi that said of his Persian Lilla, She was an
elemental force, and astonished me by her amount of life, when I
saw her day after day radiating, every instant, redundant joy and
grace on all around her? She was a solvent powerful to reconcile
all heterogeneous persons into one society: Like air or water, an ele-
ment of such great range of affinities that it combines readily with
a thousand substances. Where she is present all others will be more
than they are wont. . . . She did not study the Persian grammar, nor
the books of the seven poets, but all poems of the seven seemed to
be written upon her. For though the bias of her nature was not to
thought, but to sympathy, yet was she so perfect in her own nature
as to meet intellectual persons by the fullness of her heart, warming
them by her sentiments.25

Feminist Margaret Fuller’s autobiographical piece, entitled Leila, documents

her identification with Nazami’s characterization of the Beloved. At a time when
the burgeoning spiritual cults of New England celebrated feminine prophecy
and divinity as a countervailing force to male sexual antagonism, Fuller exceeds
Emerson’s portrayal of Laila as “joyful sympathy” to empower her instead with
boundless knowledge and impelling force. Fuller’s Laila overwhelms men rather
than reconciles them as Emerson envisages:

Most men, as they gazed on Leila were pained; they left her at last
baffled and well-nigh angry. For most men are bound in sense, time,
and thought. They shrink from the overflow of the infinite; they
cannot a moment abide in the coldness of abstractions; the weight
of an idea is too much for their lives.26
 The Persians of Concord 217

While both writers acknowledge that Laila possesses the elemental pow-
ers of Nature, Fuller points out that “to the thought of the pious wild man,
Leila manifests the regulatory powers of conscience and retribution.”27 Only the
poet, through the release of his creativity, could escape the madness to which
she could drive men. Fuller views Laila as a prophetess of “pure ministry” who
holds the “secret of mental alchemy.”28 She is the “moving principle” in unity
with God:29 “She knows all, and is nothing.”30
Of all the Concord writers, George William Curtis was the most romantic
Orientalist, and the only member of his community to travel extensively in the
Middle East. He even assumed the rather affected sobriquet howadji, a corruption
of haji, the Arabic word for “pilgrim.” During his attendance at the Brook Farm
school, where he and Hawthorne became friends, Curtis referred to himself as
Hafiz, one of the greatest of the Persian poets.31 In his Nile Notes, Curtis equates
Hafiz with the mystery and poetry of the East. Whether he was in Beirut or in
Damascus, Curtis felt that he was in Shiraz, home of Hafiz. Curtis maintains this
comparison in his second work, The Howadji in Syria, in which he states that
the Arabian Nights and Hafiz’s poetry better express the “spirit and splendor of
Oriental life than all the books on Eastern travel ever written.”32
Throughout the month of March 1851, Hawthorne read aloud nightly
to his wife Sophia The Nile Notes, a work which enchanted them. In a letter
of April 29, 1851, to Curtis, Hawthorne praised the “descriptive power” of the
travelogue to transport the reader.33 Hawthorne again commends Curtis and his
travelogues in the foreword to The Blithedale Romance.
The following excerpt from The Howadji in Syria, regarding the cafes of
Damascus, must have caught Hawthorne’s attention because of its reference to
Zenobia, a female character in The Blithedale Romance fashioned after the leg-
endary Queen of Palmyra:

Here is the golden atmosphere of romance and the natural pictur-

esque. The cafes of Damascus are passionate poems. It is the differ-
ence between a mild-eyed milkmaid and the . . . magnificence of
Zenobia.  .  .  . The best Western suggestions of these Damascus delights
are those German gardens in pleasant arbors. . . . But here again is
all the difference between Albrecht Durer and Hafiz. . . . There is a
marked vein of prose in everything German. The cafes of Damascus
are pure poetry.34

Edward Sa‘id has pointed out that the Orient was a place of pilgrimage
for European writers throughout the nineteenth century.35 In America, as well,
the Concord literary community took this pilgrimage to the imaginary space
of Sufi literature to activate their creative urge. The Persian-inspired models of
the ideal poet and prophetess/creative force ruled the Transcendental Pantheon
in the mid-nineteenth century. The act of identification with Persian persona—
218 Phillip N. Edmondson

writers and characters—transported these New England literary pilgrims to an

imaginative Orient, a space in which their creative processes were ignited. That
these American writers conceived of the creative process in terms of Sufi poetry
signifies the impact of this mystical literature on New England writing of the
mid-nineteenth century.36

Notes

 1. This article was originally published in Sufi: The Magazine of Khaniqah-i
Ni‘matullahi, 3 (Autumn 1989), 14–18.
  2. The National Union Catalogue Pre-1956 Imprints, 19 (Chicago: Mancell, 1969),
44–48, lists the first edition of the Arabian Nights in 1794. From 1803 to 1833 there
were thirty-three editions and reprints; from 1835 to 1851 the catalogue lists fifteen
entries. Certainly this great of number of entries indicates the popularity of this classic
in America, as noted in David McKay’s publication of Lane’s edition. John D. Yohannan
in A Treasury of Asian Literature (New York: John Day Company, 1956), 56, also notes that
the Arabian Nights was a popular reading in America and Britain from the eighteenth
century. Magazines featured many stories based on the classic. Another work of John
Yohannan (1977, 107–11), cites two popular American works based on the Arabian Nights:
Maria Brooks Zophiel or the Bride of Seven, and “Tales of Hafez” in the first edition of
the New York Magazine or Literary Repository (1790). Also cited is a popular tale which
adapted Persian poetry for an American audience, entitled Gulzar: or the Rose Bower, A
Tale of Persia. The popularity of the Arabian Nights stimulated periodical literature which
led to popular adaptations of Persian poetry.
  3. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne Reading (Cleveland, OH: The Folcroft Press, 1902),
113.
 4. M. D. Conway, “Transcendentalists of Concord,” Eclectic Magazine 63, no. 2
(October 1864), 231–248.
 5. G. W. Cooke, ed., Letters: George William Curtis to John S. Dwight (New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1893), 17.
 6. G. B. Kirby, Years of Experience: An Autobiographical Narrative (New York: AMS
Press, 1971), 151.
 7. E. Zolla, “Naturphilosophie and Transcendentalism Revisited,” Sophia Perennis
3:2 (1977): 65–99. This work connects German philosophy, English Romanticism, and
American Transcendental literature to Sufism.
 8. John D. Yohannan, Persian Poetry in England and America: A 200-Year History
(Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1977), 48.
  9. A. Christy, The Orient in American Transcendentalism (New York: Octagon Books,
1932), 321.
10. Louisa S. Costello, ed. and trans., The Rose Garden of Persia (London: Longman,
Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1845).
11. E. B. Cowell, “The Rose Garden of Persia,” Westminster Review (July 1847),
145–63.
12. Christy, The Orient in American Transcendentalism, 42.
 The Persians of Concord 219

13. Yohannan, Persian Poetry, 117.

14. Theodore Parker, Catalogue of Books (Concord, MA: Concord Public Library,
undated).
15. Robert N. Hudspeth, ed., The Letters of Margaret Fuller (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1965), vol. II, 121–122.
16. Christy, The Orient in American Transcendentalism, 145.
17. Samuel Longfellow, ed., Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Cambridge, MA:
Houghton Mifflin Co., 1896), vol. II, 158.
18. Ibid., 213.
19. Maria M. Tatar, Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1978), 226.
20. M. J. Elder, Nathaniel Hawthorne: Transcendental Symbolist (Cleveland: Ohio Uni-
versity Press, 1969), 64.
21. R. J. Jacobson, Hawthorne’s Conception of the Creative Process (Boston: Harvard
University Press, 1965), 35.
22. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays of Emerson (New York: Random House, 1944),
537.
23. Henry David Thoreau, Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, ed. Bradford Torrey and
Francis H. Allen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), vol. IV, 48.
24. Ibid.
25. Emerson, Essays of Emerson, 306.
26. Margaret Fuller, “Leila,” Dial (April 1841), 462.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 463.
29. Ibid., 466–7.
30. Ibid., 463.
31. Cooke, Letters: George William Curtis to John S. Dwight, 40.
32. George William Curtis, The Howadji in Syria (New York: Harper and Broth-
ers), 85.
33. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Letter to George William Curtis,” Lenox (29 April 1851).
34. Curtis, The Howadji in Syria, 323.
35. Edward W. Sa‘id, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 168.
36. I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Mrs. Marcia Moss, curator of
the Concord Free Public Library, Concord, Massachusetts.
 11

Omarian Poets of America1

Mehdi Aminrazavi

In the highways of Worcester I hear thee,

And down by the Southern seas,
In the glorious prairies of Texas
Thy music is flung to the breeze.
—Twenty Years of Omar Khayyam Club of America 1921

Omar Khayyam’s Quatrains (Ruba‘iyyat) are among the most often read and
popular literature in America. The immense popularity of Omar has left an
indelible mark on both the popular cultural and the literary circles interested in
“Eastern philosophy.” Though, technically, America never saw Omar Khayyam as
an Islamic mystic, or “Sufi,” he was understood by Western readers to possess that
magic wisdom which comes from the East. Thus, Omar Khayyam is shrouded
in an esoteric and mystical aura. His work is understood in a manner similar
to the way modern America understands the message of Rumi, or is enchanted
by Hafiz’s narratives of love, wine, women, and carpe diem.
While some saw the Ruba‘iyyat as the liberating wisdom upon which the
West waited, others saw it as the “cult of Omar,” a pagan impurity which the
“other” inflicted on the very fabric of Christian morality in America. Omar was
received in America’s North as a champion of free thinking, a renaissance man
whose Ruba‘iyyat reflected perfectly the post-bellum spirit of the time, while in
the South he was seen as the anti-Christ.
Omar Khayyam’s great journey to America began in October of 1869,
when Charles Eliott Norton published a review of FitzGerald’s translation of
the Ruba’iyyat in the North American Review. Norton gave it a glowing review
and included with his article seventy-four of FitzGerald’s translations of the
Ruba‘iyyat. These translations began the process of popularizing the Ruba‘iyyat

221
222 Mehdi Aminrazavi

among certain literary circles in New England. W. J. Black argues that America
was uniquely prepared for the Khayyamian message since, as he said, the “lofty
idealism that precipitated the Civil War had given way to a sordid materialism.”
America seems to have been ready to hear Khayyam saying,

Ah, take the cash, and let the credit go

Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!

The rise of materialism and the unraveling of the horrors of the Civil War
had brought a sense of nihilism, hedonism, and moral decay. Khayyam’s perceived
message for carpe diem must have been quite timely:

Ah, my Beloved, fill the Cup that clears

To-Day of past requests and future Fears
To-morrow?—Why, To-morrow I may be
Myself with Yesterday’s Sev’n Thousand Years2

The memory of hundreds of thousands of young men who had died in

the war was haunting America. Khayyam’s quatrains must have sounded very
timely to the wounded American society as it dealt with death, emptiness, and
horror. His advice to turn our attention to beauty, amidst the transient nature
of life and death, is a form of existential therapy.

And Those who husbanded the Golden grain,

And Those who flung it to the winds like Rain,
Alike to no such aureate Earth are Turn’d
As, buried once, Men want dug up again.3

The secularization of American society, the disappearance of religious cer-

tainty, and what Black calls the resentful “struggle against a scientific hypothesis
advanced by Darwin,”4 found a voice in Khayyam. A nation founded by Puritans
slipped into doubt.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

The Omar Khayyam Club of America

While America was ready for the message of Omar Khayyam, at least as it was
portrayed in the Victorian romanticism of Edward FitzGerald’s skillful rendi-
 Omarian Poets of America 223

tion, it took the systematic efforts of an organized club to introduce him more
widely. The uniquely prepared American climate, the beauty of FitzGerald’s
Victorian English translation, and Khayyam’s pessimism and sarcasm with regard
to matters of faith were all catalysts in the birth of the Omar Khayyam Club of
America.
The first session of the Club was held on the ninety-first birthday of
Edward FitzGerald at the Young Hotel in Boston, Saturday, March 31, 1900. The
meeting, which was called “the Festival of Saint Edward,” consisted of a num-
ber of exclusive intellectuals, each of whom related to an aspect of Khayyam’s
thought. The nine original founders of the Club were Nathan H. Dole; Eben
F. Thompson; Arthur Foote, who was a musician; Arthur Macy, a poet; Alfred
C. Potter of Harvard Library; Sylvester Baxter and Ross Turner, both of whom
were men of letters; William E. Story, a mathematician; and Colonel Thomas
Wentworth Higginson, a man of letters.
The mission of the Club was agreed upon by the officers as “An associa-
tion of men, mostly professional, who believe in good fellowship and who are
interested in the Orient in one way or another; and more particularly in that
‘King of the Wise,’ the astronomer, philosopher, and poet, Omar Khayyam.”5
Following the election of the officers,6 the Club members met several
times, including a major session in 1901, but the real work of the Club took
place on the side. Members and their friends began to collect new versions of
the Ruba‘iyyat of Khayyam and amateur translations of them began to appear.
Members composed poems following the style of the Ruba‘iyyat. Notable among
these members are Stephan C. Houghton, whose philosophical poem, “In the
Path of the Persians,” gained some recognition, and Charles Hardy Meigs, who
composed a work of miniatures capturing the spirit of the Ruba‘iyyat.
By 1919, the Omar Khayyam Club of America was responsible for intro-
ducing and translating the Ruba‘iyyat as well as some of Khayyam’s other works.
Charles Burrage, the President of the Club, describes the achievements of the
Club as follows: “The Club has as it were, stood over his [FitzGerald’s] monu-
mental translation of the whole of Omar Khayyam’s quatrains—a formidable
volume, very much more extended, of course, than FitzGerald’s very free version
and very different.”7

The Omarian Poets of New England

With the Club having established itself as the center for literary figures concerned
with Omar Khayyam, its members and affiliates began to create a literary school,
calling themselves “Omarians.” Omarians said this of Khayyam and themselves:
“Omar Khayyam, Persian philosopher and poet, established a cult immortally
cherished by the choice souls of successive generations. Omarians are generally
gentle, always genial, and when opportunity offers, joyfully congenial.”8
224 Mehdi Aminrazavi

The Omarian literary movement influenced a number of both notable and

less well-known figures who made an attempt to compose Ruba‘iyyat of their
own, spawning a new literary genre. Omarians saw themselves as the champions
of free thinking and the guardians of secularism, sharing in Omar Khayyam’s
spirit of rebellion against puritanical morality. Nathan Haskell Dole, a member
of the Club, wrote a long poem praising Omar for rejecting the prohibition
against drinking in Islam. This must have resonated deeply with Americans who
were also experiencing Prohibition initiated by Carry Nation and other Christian
moralists. Dole writes:

To Omar Khayyam

(Written for the Omar Khayyam Club of America

Under the Stress of Prohibition)

The Prophet interdicted ruby Wine—

Which, made by God Himself, must be divine—
You stood on God’s side, Omar, good for you!
And sang the Praise of Persia’s fruitful Vine.
Men trample down the purple Grapes, whose Juice
Flows in a fragrant Stream from out the sluice;
Then God comes down and breathes upon the Vat,
And lo! the red Wine meant for joyous Use.
God’s Spirit permeates the ruby Bowl
As in the Body lives the glowing Soul;
It thrills, it fills, it kills the ghastly Ills
That over hapless Men in Billows roll.
When Gloom or Disappointment settles down
And Stormy Skies disturb with horrid Frown,
One brimming Cup will put the Clouds to Flight
And all one’s Sorrows in Oblivion drown.
One brimming Cup will make the sad Heart gay,
Will burn the Winter’s Cold to warmth of May,
Will change a bitter Foe to faithful Friend,
Will make the recreant Muse the Will obey!
So, Omar, Haunter of the festive Shrine,
And Watcher of the Stars which nightly shine,
What think you of this sober Western World,
That joins Mohammed in forbidding Wine?
Do you look down with Pity in your Eyes
To see the cheering Draught you wont to prize
 Omarian Poets of America 225

Made contraband by stern fanatic Laws

Which turn the Truths of God to Devil’s Lies!
Good Wine, we know, is promised us in Heaven,
And tho the Loaf of Bread may have no leaven,
We will join you there and share your jocund Fare,
Where’er you are—in Number one or Seven!
Ah well! We’ve had full many a joyous Feast,
With you as our high Pattern and High Priest;
With Moderation which we all observe—
We of the West and you, Star of the East.
And though we have to hold an empty Glass,
’Tis filled with finest Spirit:—let it pass.
We drink your Health—Imagination reigns—
Down with the Dolts whose Ignorance is crass!
Mayhap our Burrage, with his Skill empirical
Will reperform the cana-marriage Miracle,
And (by a magic Word) change cold Water
To red red Wine to make our Praises lyrical!
Hail to you, Omar, friendliest of the Sages,
Your message cheers us, ringing through the Ages:—
Our Eben Francis has translated it
In golden Verses crowning creamy Pages.9

An unknown poet of the Omarian literary tradition read the following

poem in one of the meetings of the Club:

On his high throne a cardinal sat,

Cogitating on this and on that;
“Omarkh,” quoth he,
“Has nothing on me
For I have my own Rubyhat10
Not FitzGerald nor Thompson,” he said
“Nor Dole, Whinfield nor Roe are ahead;
As surely as they
I am truly O.K.
For my Rubyhat is much red!”11

With the rise of the New England School of Transcendentalism, interest

in Eastern philosophy was growing exponentially. As is evident by the meetings
of the Club, Worcester seems to have become one of the centers of interest in
a revival of Khayyam’s wisdom.
226 Mehdi Aminrazavi

A member of the Club from the Worcester Omarian Literary Circle, Henry
Harman Chamberlin, being inspired by Khayyam’s emphasis on temporality and
death, composed a poem called “The Price.” Mourning the death of love amidst
what he calls “The Brotherhood of Man,” especially at the time of war, Cham-
berlin read the following poem at the March 31, 1917 meeting of the Omar
Khayyam Club of America:

The Price

Not only mourn the brave who died at morn,

Who struck their blow and perished in their pride,
But mourn those other lives who also died,
Vain hopes of generations yet unborn.
Nor mourn the stricken children bayonet torn,
Shell driven o’er the blazing countryside;
But mourn Man’s twilight and his eventide,
And Brotherhood betrayed, and Faith forsworn.
Yea, chiefly mourn the most heartrending cost.
Two thousand years’ slow progress spent and lost,
This goodly oak cut down as by a sword.
Brother of Death, Sin’s crowned and armèd birth,
How long shall this new Anarch reign on earth,
Unsmitten of Thy thunderbolt, O Lord?

The following year, Chamberlin, who was deeply touched by the horrors
of World War I, composed a number of Ruba‘iyyat entitled Champagne Song of
the Wine of Victory which he read in 1918 at the annual dinner of the Omar
Khayyam Club of America. He writes:

Champagne Song or The Wine of Victory12

Still wine hath an intimate fire

That gratefully tickles each vein;
But the springtime of youth and desire
Bubbles up in the wine of champagne.

Chorus:
Bubbles up in the glass of champagne, my boys,
Bubbles up in the sparkling champagne, my boys,
Bubbles high in the golden champagne, my boys,
The sparkling, golden champagne.
 Omarian Poets of America 227

With shot and with shell and the terrors of Hell,

The Germans swept over the Aisne,
But the spirit of France broke their onward advance,
And dashed all their hopes in Champagne.

Chorus:
Then here’s the poilus of Champagne, my boys,
Who scattered the Boche in Champagne, my boys,
From the Marne and the Aisne to Champagne, my boys,
When red grew the grapes of Champagne.

They gave up their lives for their children and wives,

But they shed not their lifeblood in vain,
For the world they made free over land, over sea,
By the battles they fought in Champagne.

Chorus:
Then here’s the Poilus of Champagne, my boys,
Who laid down their lives in Champagne, my boys,
To the living and dead in Champagne, my boys,
Let’s drink to them all in champagne.

For the loved ones that mourn, they no more may return,
A tear for each bumper we drain;
But we at the height of this festival night,
Let our hearts be as light as champagne.

Chorus:
Then here’s to the merry champagne, my boys,
And here’s to the gallant champagne, my boys,
And the glory of France in Champagne, my boys,
The glorious, victorious champagne.

By 1920 the extent of the horrors of World War I and the American Civil
War had been fully disclosed. Both of these wars were somewhat of a family
feud, which made them seem even more senseless than if it were a war against
the “noble savages.” In April 1920, Henry Chamberlin writes in an ode entitled
“Supplication in the Time of War:”

We who have loitered in the paths of ease,

Waken us all, O Lord, to the World’s need!
228 Mehdi Aminrazavi

Even as men, of Thee who took no heed,

On some far isle, begirt with slumberous seas,
Long years we dreamed. For this, our sons must bleed,
Because we loitered in the paths of ease.

Fondly we dreamed of Earth’s eternal peace.

To our dull ears, the whisperings of War
Came like a fierce old legend, faint and far.
We dreamed of wealth and comfort, to release
Our souls from Fate, and Valor’s guiding star;
Because we loitered in the paths of ease.

We dreamed that Time would change and Strife would cease,

And fair, soft words beguile a tyrant’s hate.
Thy thunderbolt awoke us, not too late
To fight for Freedom and Thy Word. For these
Our sires had fought and made our nation great;
But we have loitered in the paths of ease.

Kindle our souls, that zeal for Thee increase,

So, that, in words of flame, our souls may see
Thy truth and we may win Thy victory!
Oh! make us worthier of a nobler peace,
Whereby our children, brave and wise and free,
No more shall loiter in the paths of ease.

While Khayyam’s emphasis on temporality and the finality of death was

deeply influential, his praise of beauty was more appealing to some than his
emphasis on temporality. George C. Stratton, a notable literary figure in Wash-
ington DC, composed the following Ruba‘iyyat closely following Khayyam’s
style and content:

When, on that Summer day at Twin Oaks, you

First brought th’ immortal Omar to my view
I gave the deathless quatrains scarce a thought—
Ah, ’twas but very little then I knew!

But as, from time to time, I read them o’er

Their beauty grew upon me more and more.
And now I hope that I may be enrolled
With the Elect who’ve entered in the Door.
 Omarian Poets of America 229

’Tis pleasant, then, to place upon the Shelf

With all my Omars, prized above mere pelf,
This handsome Book of those who love the Poet;
Which shows so much also of your own Self.13

Another poet, Charles Haywood Stratton, whose relationship to the previ-

ous poet is unknown, is clearly from the same Omarian tradition. He composed
a long poem on Omar Khayyam only five days after George C. Stratton (May
27, 1921) in response to the following verse as it appears in the volume entitled
Twenty Years of Omar Khayyam Club of America.

Reserve your censure; do not criticize

This book; ’Twas only meant for friendly eyes.

Charles Haywood Stratton writes in his long poem entitled “To the
Editor:”

To the Editor,

You ask the reader not to criticize

The Book you only meant for friendly eyes.
Ingrate, indeed, must be the one who’d brook
Aught but the kindliest words upon your Book!
But may not criticism be in friendly view?
And serve to call your inspiration forth again?
Wise Omar said it well for all to read—
’Tis Fellowship that lets our Life proceed.
Your happy Book now adds another link
To his strong chain of evidence, I think.
And since ‘tis Friendship makes our life worth while,
The chronicle of Friendship’s tear, or smile,
For future man to keep and read again,
Is worthy subject for your worthy pen.
’Tis plain you generous are, as well as wise,
And know the objects that all men most prize
Are those in which themselves with toil have wrought
The precious product of their own hard thought,
So you have kept a store of pages white,
’Whereon each one of us may paste, or write—
Mayhap of interest to himself alone—
The things that really make the Book his own,
230 Mehdi Aminrazavi

So now, though I have dared to criticize

You see ’tis but the view of friendly eyes.
Charles Heywood Stratton14
Washington, DC, May 27, 1921.

George Roe, an Omarian poet, rejoices at the widespread reception of Omar

Khayyam in America in his Rubaiyyat. His use of Hindu, Buddhist, and Persian
concepts like Nirvana, Maya, and Khuda (God), reveals his identification with
an inclusive spirit in the wisdom of Omar Khayyam. Roe remarks:

Friend, Omar, thy voice is still singing,

Altho’ thou art with us no more,
Thy numbers in melody ringing
Aloud on our Western shore,

In the highways of Worcester I hear thee,

And down by the Southern seas,
In the glorious prairies of Texas
Thy music is flung to the breeze.

And here in the City of Boston,

Where Freedom her glory hath shed,
Where Knowledge and Wisdom are cherished,
We gather to honor the dead.

And tho’ for a while we’re divided,

We, too, shall return to the sod
Where all living things are united
To dwell in the bosom of God.

Where anger and enmity perish,

Where sorrow forever is o’er,
Where sickness and pain cannot follow
And grief can pursue us no more.

Where Khuda (God) in love doth enfold us

And taketh our souls to his breast,
Where blessed Nirvána doth hold us
At peace in the Kingdom of Rest.

And there shall our spirits awaken,

When all are absorbed in the Whole,
 Omarian Poets of America 231

And the Maya of Self is forgotten

And Union with God is the Goal.

George Roe,
San Antonio, Texas

The list of Omarians who traveled to attend the meetings of the Club
or composed poems or, in so many cases, prose in the spirit of Khayyamian
thought is too extensive to be included here, but some further examples will
help illustrate the breadth and depth of this tradition in America.
William B. Scofield of Worcester was an Omarian poet who wrote poeti-
cally of Abraham Lincoln, applying the Omarian poetic style to his praise of the
virtues of the American President’s “great heart.” His poem, read at the meeting
of April 15, 1919, is as follows:

Somehow I think that in the near Beyond

He sits and broods O’er all this human strife
And that new furrows line his kindly face,
Full sad enough from his own weary life
While the great heart, that throbbed for others’ care
Still thrills in pity for us, even there.

At another meeting of the Omar Khayyam Club of America, Scofield

composed and dedicated the following prose to Charles D. Burrage, the founder
of the Club. The text, one of the three he read at the meeting, may well be
an indication of his own pain. The piece addresses Khayyam’s regret for seeing
his friends vanish in the wheel of life and death. The poem, read on April 2,
1921, reads:

He is often happy whose one thought is for friends. He shall know

full days of willing sacrifice; and yet his friends may turn from his
sweet ministry and then how shall he, rejected, face the coming
days?15

With the Omarian poets now far and wide, George Roe from San Antonio,
Texas varied the style, composing some quatrains, but forming his own format
often consisting of five and six stanzas like this one:

Sad, severed from the sea, a raindrop sighed,

And, smiling gently, thus the sea replied,
“A part of God are we, but we seem apart
When Alif, moving, doth our union hide.
232 Mehdi Aminrazavi

Stephan Magister, another Omarian, composed a long poem consisting of several

pages called “A Sage’s Console.” Each section varies in length, but, inspired by
Omar Khayyam, he too mourns the social and political injustices of his time.
He begins what amounts to be a critique of American society and asserts:

Maintain thy stature in men’s eyes. If driven,

On Fortune’s breakers hope not to be shriven.
Crimes, vices, follies, these may be condoned;
Misfortune only may not be forgiven.

Magister’s poems are a true reflection of the nineteenth century American social
malaise. The America of which he writes “lost his wealth, his health, his grip,”
and yet “we can despise him.” His poems are a long litany of “injustice, misery
and hate” which, for him, represent a place where there is “no golden rule or
moral law” anymore, only profiteers for whom “his neighbor is the man his
sphere of action reaches.” His critique of America ends as it begins:

MAINTAIN YOUR STATURE IN MEN’S EYES, and you will

be respected
By all discriminating souls who recognize in merit
More excellence than in the store men gather or inherit;
And though the thoughtless rabble, Power’s votaries, may slight you,
A consciousness of rectitude will solace and require you.16

Between 1906 and 1921, the Omar Khayyam Club of America published
eighteen works,17 most of which dealt with the Ruba‘iyyat. While it appears that
the Club continued its work for a few more years, the death of its key mem-
bers, contributors, and patrons brought about its eventual demise as it withered
away to obscurity and oblivion. The other reason for the decline of the Club
may have been partially due to the completion of its goal of introducing Omar
Khayyam to Americans. In most American high schools and colleges, students
were exposed to Omar Khayyam’s Ruba‘iyyat. By the 1930s, Khayyam and his
Ruba‘iyyat had become household names in America and had left an indelible
mark upon the spiritual landscape of American Society.
Let us now turn our attention to the more notable American literary fig-
ures and examine the influence of Khayyam and his Ruba‘iyyat on mainstream
literary culture.

The Ruba‘iyyat of Mark Twain

Mark Twain’s sense of humor, sarcasm, and skepticism concerning free will and
determinism fit well with Khayyam’s style, and the great personal tragedies Mark
 Omarian Poets of America 233

Twain suffered enabled him to find in Khayyam what FitzGerald had found
earlier: a familiar voice of discontent and a refusal to give into the urge to
make sense of it all. The Reverend Conway, in a lecture he once delivered, said:

I remember once conversing on the subject with Mark Twain—a

humorous man and a man of great power as well—and he startled
me, as I had not associated him with such poetic ideas. By saying
that he regarded one quatrain of Omar Khayyam’s—the famous
and the bold one beginning: ‘O thou, who man of baser Earth did
make’—as containing the most far-reaching and grand thought ever
expressed in so short a space in so few words.18

Mark Twain himself, who was quite familiar with English poetry, often
quoting the works of Tennyson, expressed his utmost reverence for the Ruba‘iyyat.
Quoting the following quatrain he said, “No poem had given me so much
pleasure before,” and in 1907 he added of the Ruba‘iyyat, “it is the only poem
I have ever carried about with me; it has not been from under my hand for
28 years.”19

Oh Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make

And ev’n with Paradise devise the snake
For all the sun where with the Face of Man
Is blacken’d-Man’s forgiveness give-and take!20

Allegedly Mark Twain composed one-hundred-twenty poems from which

Arthur L. Scott chose sixty-five of the less “embarrassing ones” and published
them in On the Poetry of Mark Twain with Selections from His Verse. Some of the
salient features of his poems and their burlesque nature resemble Omar Khayyam’s
sarcasm when the latter mentions the cruelty of fate and destiny. Mark Twain
became exposed to the Ruba‘iyyat in FitzGerald’s translation sometime around
the 1870s through Reverend Joseph H. Twichell, who drew his attention to
several Ruba‘iyyat in the Hartford Courant. It is clear from a letter Mark Twain
wrote a friend that he may have been thinking of writing his own version of
the Ruba‘iyyat. In a letter to his friend, William Dean Howells, on November
26, 1876, Mark Twain wrote, “It is no harm to put these words into wise Omar
Khayyam’s mouth, for he would have said them if he thought of it.”21
Mark Twain’s intense interest in the Ruba‘iyyat is evidenced by his col-
lection of various copies of them. On May 19, 1884, he acquired the Osgood
edition; on April 10, 1899, he ordered a half-crown copy of the Ruba‘iyyat from
Chatto Windus of London; and in 1900 he ordered a copy from Philadelphia.
In October of 1898, under the influence of FitzGerald’s translation, and having
suffered numerous personal tragedies, Mark Twain began to write the Ruba‘iyyat
of his own. Due to recent deaths in his family including his daughter, these
234 Mehdi Aminrazavi

Ruba‘iyyat inevitably grapple with age, disease, and the gradual decaying of the
human body. He composed forty-five quatrains and integrated them with two
of FitzGerald’s stanzas forming a work entitled AGE–A Rubáiyát.22
Mark Twain’s Ruba‘iyyat is a burlesque version of FitzGerald’s. A. Grib-
ben in his work Mark Twain’s Rubáiyát, asserts that, “Mark Twain mimicked the
prosody of what is called the Omar Khayyam quatrain  .  .  .  and tried to duplicate
these features.”23 “How then Is Old Age better than the threatened Hell?”24
becomes a theme that Twain embraces both in a prose format such as in “The
Five Boons of Life” and in the poetic form. Twain turns and twists Khayyam’s
poetry, attributing sarcastic remarks to him, seeming to claim that, “It is no harm
to put these words into wise Omar Khayyam’s mouth.” An example of such
incorrect attribution is when Twain writes that some people are “able to govern
kingdoms and empires but few there be that can keep a hotel.”25
By October of 1898, the devastating effect of Twain’s daughter’s death had
subsided and a much-improved financial situation brought him some degree of
peace and serenity, but the question of old age and decay remained an insoluble
problem for him. At this juncture Mark Twain wrote AGE–A Rubáiyát, a work
that walks a fine line between satire and serious reflection on the cruelty of
life. A. Gribben suggests that Mark Twain “could not decide whether he wanted
to write a winking, mocking satire on revered old age, or a savage assault on
the universal injustices of man’s transient existence and unwelcome fate.”26
The editors of Mark Twain’s Rubáiyát, A. Gribben and K. B. MacDonnell,
have argued that the salient features in Twain’s AGE–A Rubáiyát appear in the
form of several recurring themes. The first theme is the temporality of life and
pleasures therein. Twain offers advice concerning the acceptance of old age and
how one comes to terms with it. Because he lived at the time when germs and
bacterium were discovered, he became preoccupied with the concept, and this
preoccupation with the germ-ridden body became a theme in his Ruba‘iyyat.
The effects of old age and disease are the next recurring theme; for Twain, the
horror of old age replaces “The Honor of Old Age.” He suggests the “honor”
paradigm is, perhaps, an attempt to retain our dignity against the insult of old
age, or a response to the alluring temptation to make sense of the humiliation
inflicted on the aging by the merciless forces of nature.
Twain deals with death next; that which Gribben, the noted scholar of
Mark Twain, calls “the deepest, the darkest pit in this chamber of horrors, adum-
brating the gloomy line of thought.”27 The horror of death ironically becomes the
liberating power of death, for it is death that ends it all. In December 1905, in
an essay entitled “Old Age,”28 Mark Twain visits this theme and writes of death,
“Yes, it is disappointing  .  .  .  you say ‘is this it?—this?’ ” Twain’s quatrains also seem
preoccupied with sex and hedonism. Referring to his past sexual experiences
as “the long past orgies,” Twain expresses his utter frustration at his inability to
 Omarian Poets of America 235

enjoy sex in old age. This may have been why in a letter to his friend Andrew
Chatto, he refers to his Ruba‘iyyat as “Omar’s Old Age” and instructs him to
“burn them at once.” In this letter, Mark Twain states:

Confound it, this seems to be the right time to privately publish

my “Omar’s Old Age,” written two or three months ago, but I’ve
written only about 50 quatrains and am not ready. Besides, I am
playing a game—no, thinking of it. An American friend said, “Try
a new thing. Make a rare book for collectors—limited edition: 500
copies at $50 a copy, or 30 copies at $1,000 a copy; if the latter, I
will buy one copy and place 5 for you.” Come—is it a wild and
vicious scheme? Samples enclosed. Read them, then burn them at
once; don’t let any see them or hear about them. In writing me,
don’t use a title, but speak of the work as “ABC.”

Ys sincerely,
SLC29

After Mark Twain’s death, Albert Bigelow Paine came to possess many of
his manuscripts, poems, and memorabilia. Paine decided not to include Mark
Twain’s Ruba‘iyyat in the official biography of his life, Mark Twain: A Biography,
published in 1912; thus few came to know of his Ruba‘iyyat. Paine remarked
of Twain’s quatrains,

Mark Twain was not a good versifier—the demands of rhyme

and meter were too much for him, as a rule, though at times he
seemed to overcome his difficulties. These quatrains offer a fair
example both of his successes and his failures. Some of the stanzas
are not for delicate readers. These, of course, were not intended for
print.30

A. Gribben, who estimates the composition date of the AGE–A Rubáiyát

to have been around the autumn of 1898, considers Mark Twain’s Ruba‘iyyat
to be the work of his “brooding late phase” and adds that “the poem affords
glimpses of the plunging depths of his emotional state that otherwise would
never be documented . . . Mark Twain may have meant AGE-A Rubáiyát to
constitute his angry In Memoriam.”31
The poetic license which allowed Khayyam and FitzGerald to express man’s
deepest existential discontent against a fundamentally cruel and unjust world
seems to also have provided Mark Twain with that same relief. This volume
236 Mehdi Aminrazavi

includes all of Mark Twain’s Ruba‘iyyat separately, but in what follows several
examples of them are provided to indicate his deep emotional and intellectual
investment in Omar Khayyam. The following two quatrains express his frustra-
tion and outrage with aging:

34

And those who husbanded their golden Youth,

And those who flung it to the Winds, forsooth
Must all alike succumb to Age
And know the nip of his remorseless Tooth.

39

Next, Deafness comes, and men must Shout

Into a foolish Trumpet, leaving out
The Gist of what they want to say—and still
O’er what they have said hangs a crippling Doubt.

And the following Ruba‘iyyat indicate how Mark Twain played with
FitzGerald’s translations and made a burlesque version of them:

Mark Twain FitzGerald

1. 1.

Sleep! For the Sun the scores another Day Wake! For the Sun, who scatter’d into flight
Against the Tale allotted You to stay, Drives Night along with them from
  Reminding You, is Risen, and now Heav’n, and strikes
Serves Notice—ah, ignore it while You may! The Sultán’s Turret with a Shaft of Light.

2. 3.

The chill Wind blew, and those who And, as the Cock crew, those who stood
  stood before  before
The Tavern murmured, “Having drunk The Tavern shouted—“Open then the
  his Score,  Door!
   Why tarries He with empty Cup? “You know how little while we have to
   Behold,  stay,
The Wind of Youth once poured, is “And, once departed, may return no
  poured no more.  more.
 Omarian Poets of America 237

3. 7.

“Come, leave the Cup, and on the Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of
  Winter’s Snow  Spring
Your Summer Garment of Enjoyment Your Winter-garment of Repentence
 throw:  fling:
Your Tide of life is ebbing fast, and it The Bird of Time has but a little way
Exhausted once, for You no more shall To flutter—and the Bird is on the Wing
 flow.”

27. 32.

There was the door whereof I had The There was the Door to which I found no
 Key,  Key;
The Landlord too, who double seemed There was the Veil through which I might
  to me—   not see:
   Some heated Talk there was—and Some little talk of ME and THEE
   then, ah then There was—and then no more of THEE
But Rags and Fragments were we—   and ME
  Me and He.

The Eliots

Almost all the notable literary members of T. S. Eliot’s family took great inter-
est in the Ruba‘iyyat of Omar Khayyam. This interest began with T. S. Eliot’s
grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot (1811–1887) and was passed to his cousin,
Charles Eliot Norton, who introduced the Ruba‘iyyat in the review article previ-
ously mentioned, and then to another cousin, Charles William Eliot, and finally
to T. S. Eliot himself. William G. Eliot, after his retirement from the Unitarian
ministry, became the chancellor of Washington University and a civic leader.
His relationship with the Ruba‘iyyat was somewhere between his admiration for
a rational theology and his awareness of and concern with the rise of skepti-
cism and moral decay in America. Omar Khayyam’s work was a helpful and
interesting compliment to his thinking. Despite the fact that William G. Eliot’s
moral stance on the Ruba‘iyyat clearly fell in line with the spirit of Puritanism,
he must have been keenly interested in them. In 1879, Rev. S. J. Barrow wrote
an essay entitled Omar Khayyam, published in the Unitarian Review, wherein he
sarcastically refers to William G. Eliot’s interest, stating “A ministerial friend of
ours had already read the Ruba‘iyyat sixty times.”32
Charles Eliot Norton, who was a pioneer in introducing Khayyam to the
American audience, was a relative of T. S. Eliot and an Emeritus Professor at
Harvard. It was he who wrote the review of the Ruba‘iyyat in 1869 but he did
238 Mehdi Aminrazavi

not know FitzGerald was the translator since the latter, as was previously dis-
cussed, published his translation anonymously. In England in 1868, Norton met
Burne-Jones, a literary figure who was ecstatic to have discovered the Ruba‘iyyat
and gave a copy of FitzGerald’s translation to Norton who brought them back
to America and later reviewed them.
Norton, who saw unity of thought in the Ruba‘iyyat, not only viewed
Khayyam as a materialist but described his style as “moral,” “shrewd,” “inquisi-
tive and independent,” and as showing “penetrating imagination,” and “a manly
independence.”33 Norton’s review, as previously explored, sparked much interest
in the Ruba‘iyyat in America and even he was surprised by the reception, calling
it “a little craze” for the book.34
The other cousin, Charles William Eliot, a president of Harvard University,
was also known for his interest in the Ruba‘iyyat. In 1890 he was asked to lead
a committee of fifty people to investigate the activities of a group called the
Demon’s Association with whom Khayyam had been identified. His conclusion
was that the affiliation was as he said, “half baked” and a reflection of a culture
still deeply influenced by the Puritans.
The impact and influence of Omar Khayyam and his Ruba‘iyyat on T. S.
Eliot, a giant among American-British literary figures, was even more profound
than it had been on Mark Twain. Khayyam’s voice spoke to Eliot’s modern mind
and Khayyam’s spirit of discontent was perhaps even more admired by Eliot than
the explicit message of the Ruba‘iyyat.
Eliot was the son of St. Louis’s founding Unitarian minister who at the age
of fourteen, read the Ruba‘iyyat. The effect was so profound that Eliot described
it as a metamorphosis that made him a poet instantly for the rest of his life:

I can recall clearly enough the moment when, at the age of fourteen
or so, I happened to pick up a copy of FitzGerald’s Omar which was
lying about, and the almost overwhelming introduction to a new
world of feeling which this poem was the occasion of giving me.
It was like a sudden conversion; the world appeared anew, painted
with bright, delicious and painful colours. . . .35

V. M. D’Ambrosio, in her work Eliot Possessed: T. S. Eliot and FitzGerald’s

RUBA’IYYAT, 36 elaborates on the spirit of rebelliousness that is given voice in
those quatrains of Khayyam that Eliot quotes and the Khayyamian air that colors
some of Eliot’s works. In “Animula,” section II, Eliot remarks:

The heavy burden of the growing soul

Perplexes and offends more, day by day;
Week by week, offends and perplexes more
With the imperatives of ‘is and seems’
And may and may not, desire and control.
 Omarian Poets of America 239

The pain of living and the drug of dreams

Curl up the small soul in the window seat
Behind the Encyclopœdia Britannica.37

Unlike some of the Omarian poets, Eliot’s relationship with Khayyam and
his Ruba‘iyyat was far too complex and profound to allow Eliot to merely imi-
tate him and compose quatrains copying the style of the Ruba‘iyyat. Eliot went
on to incorporate the “message” into his poetry and other writings. Eliot, who
refers to his encounter with the Ruba‘iyyat as having been “absorbed,” shows
the crisis this absorption created in a character in “Animula,” the youth of the
story, who hides his feelings of love and absorption from his family because,
like Omar Khayyam, he too respects reason. Eliot admired Khayyam and felt
himself faced with the same choice between the sobriety of reason identified
as self-control and the drunkenness of wine associated with “drug,” a vehicle of
freedom and forgetfulness from the world.
Whatever the source of Eliot’s pain and anguish might have been, like
Khayyam, he takes refuge in many things. For Khayyam it is love, the beloved,
and wine, while for Eliot, the Encyclopedia Britannica, becomes a thing for one
to throw oneself into, an endless project to take one’s angst away. One can,

Curl up the small soul in the window seat

Behind the Encyclopœdia Britannica.

Omar Khayyam and T. S. Eliot shared a common spirit, that of dismay

and discontent for authority and control. Eliot even defends Khayyam against
critics like Charles Whibley who in alarm at Omar’s popularity, had belittled
Omarianism by exclaiming that, “We had pictured to ourselves the honest citi-
zen returning from his toil with a legful of masterpieces and discussing with
his family circle, Stevensonianism, Omarianism, and other strange cults.”38 To
the above Eliot responded, “Whibley . . . whether he was opposing the act of
a government . . . or the Omar Khayyam Club, he modulated his thunders
according to the tree, shrub, or weed to be blasted.”39
Eliot not only uses themes and concepts that reverberate throughout the
Ruba‘iyyat, he also borrows structural elements from the works of Khayyam. The
Ruba‘iyyat and The Waste Land both begin with a tavern scene and proceed to
offer an illustrated depiction of spring.40

Other American Literary Movements and Figures

In 1878, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a prolific Orientalist and author of The Sultan
Goes to Ispahan,41 wrote a review of the Ruba‘iyyat. He said, “The world is very
old to Omar and sentient with the dust of dead generations.”42 Aldrich admired
240 Mehdi Aminrazavi

Khayyam for the beauty of the form of the Ruba‘iyyat and the simple yet profound
message of the quatrains, which he says, “has laws which are not to be broken
with impunity.” Aldrich remarks that the theme is an “instrument on which one
may strike the highest or the deepest note, but it must be a full note.”43
Unlike Eliot and Norton, who felt they had to defend the moral, spiritual,
and religious aspects of the Ruba‘iyyat, Aldrich’s attention is focused more on
the technical aspects and the very form of quatrains. In fact, Aldrich claims that
“unlike Hafiz, Firdawsi, and the rest,” Khayyam has little to say about love; and
Aldrich never seems to grasp what Khayyam means by “beloved.” Was it God, a
mistress, or a friend? Despite Aldrich’s primary interest in the formalistic aspect
of the Ruba‘iyyat and his admitted semantic confusion, he was not completely
unaware of the work’s message, as the following suggests:

Like those intaglios turned up from time to time in Roman earth.

Omar Khayyam has shown us once more that a little thing may be
perfect, and that perfection is not a little thing. But are these poems
in any sense little things? Here and there the poignant thought in
them cuts very deep. It is like a crevasse in an Alpine glacier, only a
finger’s breadth at the edge, but reaching to unfathomable depths.44

Among these other American men of letters, James Whitcomb Riley, also
known as the “Hoosier poet,” became interested in Khayyam and wrote a book
entitled The Ruba‘iyyat of Doc Sifers.45 Riley, a writer of notable distinction,
embraced Khayyam’s spirit of rationalism, humanism, and agnosticism and, speak-
ing through a fictitious doctor named Sifers, he composed quatrains, though he
changed the form from Khayyam’s aaba to aabb. The following demonstrates his
engagement with and modification of Omar Khayyam’s Ruba‘iyyat:

Ef you don’t know DOC SIFERS I’ll jes argy,

  here and now,
You’ve bin a mighty little while about here,
  Anyhow!
‘Cause Doc he’s rid these roads and woods—
  er swum ‘em, now and then—
And practiced in this neighborhood sence hain’t
  no tellin’ when!

John Hay, another notable follower of Khayyam, came from the American
mid-West. In December 1897, he gave a lecture at the Omar Khayyam Club
of London entitled, “In Praise of Omar.” As he reported on the popularity of
Khayyam and the Ruba‘iyyat in America, he mentioned hearing a miner in the
Rocky Mountains reciting the following quatrain of Khayyam:
 Omarian Poets of America 241

’Tis but a Tent where takes him one day’s rest

A Sultan to the realm of Death addrest
The Sultan rises, and the dark Ferrash
Strikes and prepares it for another Guest

Instances like the one Hay shared show the far reaching folk influence of
Khayyam’s work.
John Hay was not only a respected literary figure, but he was also U.S.
Ambassador to England and Secretary of State under President McKinley.
His interest in Persian literature and his political stature gave credence to the
Ruba‘iyyat for the public. Hay referred to Khayyam as “a man of extraordinary
genius,” and went on to say that Omar “had sung a song of incomparable
beauty and power in an environment no longer worthy of him, in a language
of narrow range, for many generations the song was virtually lost.” Referring
to FitzGerald as “the win brother” of Khayyam, Hay praised the translator for
singing the “forgotten poem, with all its original melody and force.”46
He had this to say about the Ruba‘iyyat:

The exquisite beauty, the faultless form, the singular grace of those
amazingly stanzas, were not more wonderful than the depth and
breadth of their profound philosophy, their knowledge of life, their
dauntless courage, their serene facing of the ultimate problems of
life and death.47

The other major figure who should be mentioned is Ezra Pound, the
eminent literary genius and a close friend of T. S. Eliot, who had also developed
a great admiration for Khayyam and his Ruba‘iyyat; a reverence, which, unlike
Eliot’s, lasted until the end. Questioning whether he should leave London for a
different place, in a letter to his friend, William Carlos Williams, Pound paired
himself with Omar Khayyam, asking:

Whether self-inflicted torture ever has the slightest

  Element of dignity in it?
Or whether I am Omar,
Have I a country after all?48

Again in a letter from Paris to his former professor, Pound wrote, “I am perhaps
didactic; so in a sense, or different sense are Homer, Dante, Villon, and Omar, and
FitzGerald’s translation of Omar is the only good poem of the Victorian era.”49
To many critics, Pound’s passionate interest in Omar Khayyam remains a
mystery, one that James Miller reflected on, saying, “Omar Khayyam was one
of the Pound’s genuine weaknesses, a bizarre taste for one who shaped the
242 Mehdi Aminrazavi

modernity of modern poetry.”50 Ezra Pound’s highest admiration for Khayyam,

in addition to his extensive references to him in works like Canto 80, can best
be seen in the fact that he named his own son “Omar Shakespeare Pound,” and
said of the name, “Just note the crescendo.”
Finally, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a figure of great eminence, must be men-
tioned, although his encounter with Khayyam was brief. Emerson read FitzGer-
ald’s translation on his trip to Europe and Egypt. His biographer, Ralph Rusk,
writes, “During the voyage, Emerson read and reread Omar Khayyam forgetting
that he had condemned it six months before.”51 His interest in Khayyam may
have been dampened by the fact that Emerson himself was an avid proponent
of transcendentalism while Khayyam, at least on the surface, was very earthly.
With the spirit of materialism on the rise, and the puritanical morality in
decline, Khayyam’s Ruba‘iyyat became an easy target for those who sought a
scapegoat. Omar’s popularity even created an “anti-Omarian movement,” with its
own literary genre. It included intellectuals and preachers, statesmen and others
concerned with the disintegration of the moral fiber of the society. A thorough
study of the anti-Omarian literature in America is beyond the scope of our work
here but it provides a fascinating example of how a literary genre was formed
bent on destroying the influence of Omar Khayyam, who was thought of by
some as the foreign anti-Christ.52

Notes

 1. Although this chapter is significantly modified and revised, it is based on a

section of chapter eight of the author’s The Wine of Wisdom (Oxford: ONEWORLD
Press, 2005), 230–67.
 2. Omar Khayyam, The Ruba‘iyyat of Omar Khayyam, trans. Edward FitzGerald
(New York: Walter J. Black, 1942), 128.
 3. Ibid., 126.
 4. Ibid., 12.
 5. Charles Burrage, ed., Some Doings of the Omar Khayyam Club of America (Bos-
ton, 1922), 17.
 6. For a complete list of the officers see Ibid., 12.
 7. Ibid., 25.
 8. Ibid., 22.
 9. Ibid., 23.
10. The author writes Ruba‘iyyat as “Rubyhat.”
11. Ibid., 24.
12. Burrage, Some Doings of the Omar Khayyam Club of America, 30–31.
13. Ibid., 34.
14. Ibid., 33.
15. Ibid., 8.
16. Ibid., 14.
 Omarian Poets of America 243

17. For a complete list of the publications of the Club, see Ibid., 38–40.
18. A. J. Arberry, The Romance of the Ruba‘iyyat, trans. FitzGerald (London, 1959,
1st ed.), 34.
19. A. Gribben and K. B. MacDonnell, Mark Twain’s Ruba‘iyyat (Austin, TX: Jenkins
Publishing Co., 1983), 10.
20. Khayyam, The Ruba‘iyyat of Omar Khayyam, 150.
21. Ibid., 10.
22. Gribben and MacDonnell, Mark Twain’s Ruba‘iyyat, 14.
23. Mark Twain Papers at Berkeley, Notebook 40, TS, 47.
24. Gribben and MacDonnell, Mark Twain’s Ruba‘iyyat, 15.
25. This appears in the Appendix A of A Tramp Abroad (1880); see Ibid., 11.
26. A. Gribben and K. B. MacDonnell, Mark Twain’s Ruba‘iyyat, 17.
27. Ibid., 18.
28. John S. Tuckey, ed., Mark Twain’s Fables of Man (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1971), 441–442.
29. The original is in the archives of Chatto and Windus, Ltd., London; see
A. Gribben and K. B. MacDonnell, Mark Twain’s Ruba‘iyyat, 27. The initials SLC stand
for Samuel Langhorne Clemens.
30. Ibid., 24.
31. Ibid.
32. S. J. Barrow, “Editions Note Book,” Unitarian Review and Religious Magazine,
no. 11 (1879), 384–86.
33. Charles E. Norton, “Nicolas’s Quatrains de Kheyam” North American Review,
no. 225 (1869), 565–66.
34. A. K. Terhune, The Life of Edward FitzGerald (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1947), 213.
35. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of
Poetry to Criticism in England (London: Faber and Faber Press, 1985), 33.
36. V. M. D’Amrrosio, Eliot Possessed: T. S. Eliot and FitzGerald’s RUBA‘IYYAT (New
York: New York University Press, 1989).
37. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 33.
38. Charles Whibley, “Musings Without Method,” Blackwood’s, no. 170 (1903), 287.
39. T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber,1951), 499.
40. D’Amrrosio, Eliot Possessed, 183–88. In her “Table of Textual Comparison,”
D’Ambrosio clearly has shown some of these similarities.
41. Cited and discussed in Charles E. Samuels, Thomas Bailey Aldrich (New York:
Twayne, 1965), 55–58.
42. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, “A Persian Poet,” Atlantic Monthly, no. 41(1878), 421–26.
43. Ibid., 424.
44. Ibid., 424.
45. James Whitcomb Riley, The Ruba‘iyyat of Doc Sifers, illustrated by C.M. Relyea
(New York: Century Co., 1897).
46. John Hay, In Praise of Omar; an address before the Omar Khayyam Club (Port-
land, 1897), 5. And also in the New York Times, October 21, 1905.
47. Ibid., 3.
48. Ezra Pound, Letters of Ezra Pound, (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 158–59.
244 Mehdi Aminrazavi

49. Ibid., 180.

50. James Miller, T. S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons (Pennsyl-
vania: Penn State Press, 1977), 154.
51. Ralph Rusk, Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Scribners, 1949), 478.
52. For more information on the anti-Omarian literature see E. Heron-Allan,
Ruba‘iyyat of ‘Umar Khayyam, (London, 1908), xv; H.G. Keene, “Omar Khayyam” in
Nathan Haskell Dole, Ruba‘iyyat of Omar Khayyam (Boston: 1891), 2:423; Richard Le
Gallienne “Fin de Siecle Cult of FitzGerald’s Ruba‘iyyat of Omar Khayyam” in Review of
National Literature, 2 (1971), 74–75. Ruba‘iyyat of Omar Khayyam, translated into Christian;
Charles Potter, A Bibliography of the Ruba‘iyyat of Omar Khayyam, #1066. Richard Le
Gallienne, having called Khayyam “the thinker-drinker” in 1897, wrote Omar Repentant
(New York: Mitchell Kennerly, 1908) and pronounced “The Wine! The Grape! Oh, call it
Whiskey and be done with it!” Quatrains of Christ. See also Charles Potter, A Bibliography
of the Ruba‘iyyat of Omar Khayyam, # 942 (1908) and Omar or Christ. See Ibid., 668
(1914); A. H. Miller, “The Omar Cult,” Academy, no. 59 (1900), 55; Bernard Holland,
“The Popularity of Omar,” National Review, XXXIII, (June, 1899), 643–52; C.D. Broad,
“The Philosophy of Omar Khayyam and Its Relation to that of Schopenhauer,” Review,
no. CLXVI (November 1906), 544–56; “The Harm of Omar,” T. P.’s Weekly, no. XVI
(September 9, 1910), 340. See also G. K. Chesterton, Heretics (London, 1906); William
Hastie, Festival of Spring from the Divan of Jelaledin (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons,
1903), xxxiii, quoted in John D. Yohannan, “Fin de Siecle Cult of FitzGerald’s Ruba‘iyat
of Omar Khayyam” in Review of National Literature, 2 (1971), 85; Havelock Ellis, “Sexual
Inversion,” Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 2 vols. (New York: Random House, 1942),
vol. 1, 50–51; Edwin Arlington Robinson, Untriangulated Stars: Letters of Edwin Arlington
Robinson to Harry de Forest Smith, 1890–1905, ed. Denham Sutcliffe, (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1947), xxii. See also Sylvanus Urban, Gentleman’s Magazine, Old
Series, no. CCLXXXIV (Jan–June, 1898), 413; Willfred Meynell, “The Cause of Omar’s
Popularity,” Academy, no. LXVI (March 1904), 274; Edmund Gosse, Critical Kit-Kats,
(London: William Heinemann 1895), 65–92.
 12

“Bond Slave to FitzGerald’s Omar”

Mark Twain and The Ruba‘iyyat

Alan Gribben

The irreverent American realist author and humorist Samuel L. Clemens (1835–
1910), better known by his nom de plume, “Mark Twain,” might seem like
an unlikely admirer of the Persian mathematician, astronomer, and poet Omar
Khayyam, who wrote a series of brooding meditations on human existence before
he died in the twelfth century. After all, Twain’s rather conventional tastes in
poetry had made him an enthusiast of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s stately eloquence
and Rudyard Kipling’s emphatic rhythms, though he also surprised some friends
by being tremendously intrigued with Robert Browning’s subtle mysteries. An
avid reader of all types of literature, however, Twain was bound to encounter
the intense vogue for Omar Khayyam’s verses that swept across Great Britain
and America in the second half of the nineteenth century. The English poet and
translator Edward FitzGerald was responsible for the massive wave of interest in
The Ruba‘iyyat, though the craze commenced a number of years after he pub-
lished, in 1859, a freely rendered English version of Omar Khayyam’s arresting
quatrains. FitzGerald went on to issue four revised editions during his lifetime,
the last appearing in 1879. Favorable reviews finally made an impact in the last
decade of FitzGerald’s career, and he was able to savor the growing reception
of his work before he passed away in 1883.
From the moment that Mark Twain first laid eyes on a translation of The
Ruba‘iyyat’s quatrains, he became a rapt and proselytizing devotee of both their
beauty and their message. Number 45 in FitzGerald’s fourth edition was perhaps
Twain’s favorite quatrain:

A Moment’s Halt—a momentary taste

Of BEING from the Well amidst the waste—

245
246 Alan Gribben

And Lo!—the phantom Caravan has reach’d

The NOTHING it set out from—Oh, make haste!1

The possibility that certain verses throughout The Ruba‘iyyat might involve
symbolic Muslim allusions to the spiritual doctrines of mystic Sufism seemed
to matter little to Twain; he reveled in the bluntness of the speaker’s advocacy
of sybaritic hedonism and chose not to ponder any intimations regarding the
purification of one’s soul. The habitually skeptical side of Twain’s psyche especially
responded to the fatalistic tone struck repeatedly, as in Stanza 8:

Whether at Naishapur or Babylon,

Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run,
The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,
The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.

Or, similarly, Stanza 17:

Think, in this battered Caravanserai [an inn for travelers]

Whose Portals are alternate Night and Day,
How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp
Abode his destined Hour, and went his way.

Egalitarian sentiments like these about the leveling consequence of death thrilled
FitzGerald’s Victorian Age with their daringly cynical message, as did the carpe
diem messages in parts such as Stanza 24:

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,

Before we too into the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and—sans End!

These admonitions were reinforced by warnings such as Stanza 71:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

Twain’s first recorded reference to The Ruba‘iyyat, merely a mention of

“wise old Omar Kheyam [sic],” occurred in a letter he wrote in 1876.2 The
previous year his good friend the Reverend Joseph H. Twichell, despite being
Twain’s mainstay of spiritual reassurance in sermons and private conversations,
had nevertheless urged him to
 “Bond Slave to FitzGerald’s Omar” 247

Read (if you haven’t) the extracts from Omar Khayyam, on the first
page of this morning’s [Hartford, Connecticut] Courant. I think we’ll
have to get the book. I never yet came across anything that uttered
certain thoughts of mine so adequately. And it’s only a translation.
Read it, and we’ll talk it over. . . . Surely this Omar was a great
poet. Anyhow, he has given me an immense revelation this morning.3

More than anything else this Congregational clergyman’s enthusiastic rec-

ommendation attests to the evocative and haunting beauty of the ancient poem,
which overcame at first blush a Protestant minister’s fixed scruples against any-
thing resembling a bleak determinism.
Presumably Mark Twain took the Reverend Twichell’s advice about imme-
diately obtaining the book, but in any event it is certain that Twain owned a
personal copy of The Ruba’iyyat at least by 1884, when he instructed his busi-
ness manager to order FitzGerald’s final edition.4 Today there is evidence that
he and his family eventually possessed (or referred to having read) no fewer
than nine different copies of various editions of The Ruba‘iyyat, indicating that
it definitely became a literary touchstone for Twain. The poem so thoroughly
engrossed the entire Clemens household that one of the Clemens daughters,
Clara, even owned a playful spin-off, The Ruba‘iyyat of a Persian Kitten,5 and in
1908 Twain named two of his favorite cats “Omar.”6
Moreover, Twain’s extensive comments about the poem are uniformly
praising. One friend, Moncure D. Conway, recalled Twain’s citing Stanza 81—“the
famous and the bold one beginning: ‘O Thou, who man of baser earth did
make’—as containing the most far-reaching and grand thought ever expressed in
so short a space in so few words.” Conway said he was “startled . . . , as I had
not associated him with such poetic ideas.”7 The quatrain to which Twain had
alluded concerns the respective responsibility of God and man: “Oh Thou, who
Man of baser Earth didst make, / And ev’n with Paradise devise the Snake: /
For all the Sun wherewith the Face of Man / Is blacken’d—Man’s forgiveness
give—and take!”8
To another correspondent Twain pledged in 1899, “I am bond slave to
FitzGerald’s Omar.”9 No other single poem received this degree of applause from
Twain, who more often played the part of a caustic critic of authors he was
reading. The rival translations that followed FitzGerald’s masterful rendition, on
the other hand, usually did not please Twain’s taste. Of Elizabeth Alden Curtis’s
1899 effort, One Hundred Quatrains, from the Ruba‘iyyat of Omar Khayyam, Twain
wrote indignantly: “It is the most detailed & minutely circumstantial plagiarism
that has yet been perpetrated in any century,” denouncing it as a “sacrilege”
committed upon “a noble poem.” Her translation was “as if a Tammany boss
should wreck the Taj [Mahal] & then rebuild it after his notions of what it
ought to be.”10 Eben Francis Thompson’s effort, The Quatrains of Omar Khayyam
of Nishapur, fared a little better in Twain’s estimation, but his secretary reported
248 Alan Gribben

that Twain objected to its not resembling FitzGerald’s translation in all respects,
causing him to note facetiously that “Omar had changed his principles.”11 Even
reading this less satisfactory version, however, prompted Twain to remark that
“the more a disciple gets of Omar the thirstier he becomes.”12
The supreme and most sincere act of flattery on Twain’s part consisted of
his effort to construct an imitation of the poem. Since his earliest years as a writer
he had manifested an irrepressible urge to affectionately burlesque any literary
work he truly admired, whether it be Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Thomas Malory’s
Morte D’Arthur. Half in earnest, half tongue-in-cheek, then, he began to jot down
a series of imitative quatrains, first in his notebook and then on small separate
sheets of paper. Probably he was sojourning in Vienna in 1898 when he started
this composition. Twain’s AGE—A Rubáiyát would laboriously follow the stanza
and metrical style of FitzGerald’s translation, but whereas FitzGerald’s version of
The Ruba‘iyyat celebrates youth, Twain’s forty-five quatrains contrastingly catalogue
and bemoan the ailments and regrets that afflict elderly men. Germs, tooth decay,
gum disease, coughing, pneumonia, foot bunions, “disputatious” heirs, alcoholism,
red noses, morning aches, incontinence, senility, diminished blood circulation, deaf-
ness, sexual impotence, poor eyesight, flatulence, whitened hair, rheumatism—hardly
any possible indignity of old age is omitted from his dismal list.
By the time Twain turned to this project, he himself had plenty of cause
to express remorse and had become all too familiar with the aches of both
body and soul. His beloved daughter Susy had died a few years earlier of spinal
meningitis, his daughter Jean was a victim of severe epilepsy, his family’s idyl-
lic existence in Hartford, Connecticut, had been shattered by bankruptcy, his
financial problems had become worldwide newspaper fodder, his older brother
Orion had recently died, and his wife Olivia was weighed down with early
symptoms of heart disease. Add to this the fact that Twain himself, now in
his mid-sixties, was beginning to feel the effects of aging in an era when the
medications available to alleviate gerontic discomforts were relatively few. It is a
small wonder that the miseries accompanying aging should suggest themselves
to him as a literary topic.
Twain’s verses mock the conventional notion of old age as bringing honor
and security in one’s golden years. But as so often happened with Twain’s writ-
ings, he had difficulty in deciding whether he was composing a serious lament or
a comic spoof. The result is a far cry from the shimmering perfection of Omar
Khayyam’s adjurations; indeed, about the best that can be said is that Twain’s
imitation manages to maintain a resemblance to the original. Twain’s Ruba‘iyyat
adaptation, like his numerous other poetic attempts, will never be included in
any anthology of American poetry; quite clearly his genius lay elsewhere. Still,
AGE—A Rubáiyát contains passages that exceed what most amateur versifiers
could achieve. Here follow nine sample passages from the forty-five quatrains
that survive from Twain’s abortive poetic experiment.
 “Bond Slave to FitzGerald’s Omar” 249

In this subduing Draught of tender green

And kindly Absinth, with its wimpling Sheen
Of dusky half-lights, let me drown
The haunting Pathos of the Might-Have-Been.

Whether one hide in some secluded Nook—

Whether at Liverpool or Sandy Hook—
’Tis one. Old Age will search him out—and He—
He—He—when ready will know where to look.

11

Think—in this battered Caravanserai,

Whose Portals open stand all Night and Day,
How Microbe after Microbe with his Pomp
Arrives unasked, and comes to stay.

19

O Voices of the Long Ago that were so dear!

Fall’n Silent, now, for many a Mould’ring Year,
O whither are ye flown? Come back,
And break my Heart but bless my grieving ear.

20

Some happy Day my Voice will Silent fall,

And answer not when some that love it call:
Be glad for Me when this you note—and think
I’ve found the Voices lost, beyond the Pall.

23

O Death, sole Precious Thing in This World’s gift,

Behold us in this shabby Life adrift!
Have Thou our Worship—unto Thee,
Best Friend of Man, our tired Hearts we lift.
250 Alan Gribben

34
And those who husbanded their golden Youth,
And those who flung it to the Winds, forsooth
Must all alike succumb to Age
And know the nip of his remorseless Tooth.

37
The bleary Eyes and then the fumbling Hands
Come next in turn and mark the wasting Sands
Of that poor Life, a Wreck forlorn,
Dismantled driving toward the Unknown Lands.

45
Rheumatic Gout!—a momentary Taste
Of being dip’d in Hell full to the Waist,—
And lo, the mortal Misery has reached
The Limit of Endurance—O make Haste!13

Twain published twenty of his less disturbing quatrains in a humorous

sketch titled My Boyhood Dreams that appeared in the January 1900 issue of
McClure’s Magazine. These lines exhorted readers to enjoy the pleasures of youth,
anticipate the inevitability of old age, and watch for the deplorable signs of
decrepitude. The rest of Twain’s verses stayed out of print until 1983.
In 1907, summing up what Omar Khayyam’s Ruba‘iyyat had meant to
him since he first discovered its appeal in the late 1870s, Twain announced,
unreservedly: “No poem had ever given me so much pleasure before, and none
has given me so much pleasure since; it is the only poem I have ever carried
about with me; it has not been from under my hand for twenty-eight years.”14
Taking into account the evidence that FitzGerald’s rendition of Omar Khayyam’s
poem deeply appealed to Twain in both his halcyon years of family stability,
growing fame, and increasing wealth during the 1880s and likewise during his
periods of grief and despair in the 1890s and 1900s, the hold this literary work
retained on Twain’s imagination is truly astounding. Only the Christian Bible had
any comparably long-term effect on this changeable and often irascible author.

Notes

 1. The Sufistic Quatrains of Omar Khayyam in Definitive Form, Including the Transla-
tions of Edward FitzGerald, intro. Robert Arnot (New York: M. Walter Dunne, 1903), 75.
 2. Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson, eds., Mark Twain-Howells Letters
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1960), 164. Letter from Cle-
mens to William D. Howells, November 26, 1876.
 “Bond Slave to FitzGerald’s Omar” 251

 3. Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography, 2 vols. (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1912), vol. 1, 615. Paine apparently misdated Twichell’s postcard, because in a
soon-to-be unpublished note Dwayne Eutsey establishes that the Hartford Courant only
printed excerpts from The Ruba‘iyyat on December 22, 1875 (“Twichell Wrote ‘Ruba‘iyyat
Note’ Four Years Earlier Than Previously Thought”).
 4. Samuel C. Webster, ed., Clemens to Charles L. Webster, May 19, 1884, Mark
Twain, Business Man (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1946), 254.
 5. Oliver Herford, The Ruba‘iyyat of a Persian Kitten., illus. by the author (New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904). See Alan Gribben, Mark Twain’s Library: A Reconstruc-
tion, 2 vols. (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1980), 310.
 6. Clemens to Dorothy Sturgis Harding, October 27, 1908, ALS at Columbia
University, photocopy in the Mark Twain Papers, University of California at Berkeley.
 7. A. J Arberry. The Romance of the Ruba‘iyyat: Edward FitzGerald’s First Edition
Reprinted with Introduction and Notes (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1959), 34.
 8. The Sufistic Quatrains of Omar Khayyam, 94.
 9. Gribben, Mark Twain’s Library, 516. Clemens to “Dr. Sullivan,” November 8,
1899.
10. Ibid., Clemens to Joseph H. Twichell, January 1, 1900. Letter from the Mark
Twain Papers, University of California at Berkeley.
11. Ibid., 517. Letter from the Isabel V. Lyon Journals, TS 221, Mark Twain Papers,
University of California at Berkeley.
12. Ibid., Clemens to James Logan, February 2, 1907. Letter from the Mark Twain
Papers, University of California at Berkeley.
13. Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Ruba‘iyyat, intro. Alan Gribben. Textual note by Kevin
B. MacDonnell (Austin, TX: Jenkins Publishing Co., 1983), 42–52.
14. Gribben, Mark Twain’s Library, 518. Autobiographical Dictation, October 7, 1907.
Quoted from the Mark Twain Papers, University of California at Berkeley.
 13

Mark Twain’s Ruba‘iyyat

AGE–A Rubáiyát 1

Mark Twain

Sleep! for the Sun that scores another Day

Against the Tale allotted You to stay,
Reminding You, is Risen, and now
Serves Notice—ah, ignore it while You may!

The chill Wind blew, and those who stood before

The Tavern murmured, “Having drunk his Score,
Why tarries He with empty Cup?” Behold,
The Wine of Youth once poured, is poured no more.

“Come, leave the Cup, and on the Winter’s Snow

Your Summer Garment of Enjoyment throw:
Your Tide of life is ebbing fast, and it
Exhausted once, for You no more shall flow.”

While yet the Phantom of false Youth was mine,

I heard a Voice from out the Darkness whine

253
254 Mark Twain

“O Youth, O whither gone?—return,

And bathe my Age in thy reviving Wine.”

In this subduing Draught of tender green

And kindly Absinth, with its wimpling Sheen
Of dusky half-lights, let me down
The haunting Pathos of the Might-Have-Been.

For I was Gay beyond the storied Clam

That at High Tide disports, or Playful Lamb
That happy skips; and foolishly
Rebuff ’d Reproach, and did not care a Rap.

For every nickled Joy, marred and brief,

We pay some day its Weight in golden Grief
Mined from our Hearts. Ah, murmur not—
From this one-sided Bargain dream of no Relief!

The Joy of Life, that streaming through their Veins

Tumultuous swept, falls slack—and wanes
The Glory in the Eye—and one by one
Life’s Pleasures perish and make place for Pains.

Whether one hide in some secluded Nook—

Whether at Liverpool or Sandy Hook—
’Tis one. Old Age will search him out—and He—
He—He—when ready will know where to look.

10

From Cradle unto Grave I keep a House

Of Entertainment where may drowse
 Mark Twain’s Ruba’iyyat 255

Bacilli and Kindred Germs—or feed—or breed

Their festering Species in a deep Carouse.

11

Think—in this battered Caravanserai,

Whose Portals open stand all Night and Day,
How Microbe after Microbe with his Pomp
Arrives unasked, and comes to stay.

12

Our ivory Teeth, confessing to the Lust

Of masticating, once, now own Disgust
Of clay-plug’d Cavities—full soon our Snags
Are emptied, and our Mouths are filled with Dust.

13

Our Gums forsake the Teeth and tender grow,

And fat, like over-ripened Figs—we know
The sign—the Riggs Disease is ours, and we
Must list this Sorrow, add another Woe;

14

Our Lungs begin to fail and soon we Cough,

And chilly Streaks play up our Backs, and off
Our fever’d Foreheads drips an icy Sweat—
We scoffed before, but now we may not scoff.

15

Some for the Bunions that afflict us prate

Of Plasters unsurpassable, and hate
To cut a Corn—ah cut, and let the Plaster go,
Nor murmur if the Solace come too late.

16

Some for the Honors of Old Age, and some

Long for its Respite from the Hum
256 Mark Twain

And Clash of sordid Strife—O Fools,

Their Past should teach them what’s to Come.

17

Lo, for the Honors, cold Neglect instead!

For Respite, disputatious Heirs a Bed
Of Thorns for them will furnish. Go,
Seek not Here for Peace—but Yonder—with the Dead.

18

For whether Zal and Rustum heed this Sign,

And even smitten thus, will not repine,
Let Zal and Rustum shuffle as they may,
The Fine once levied they must cash the Fine.

19

O Voices of the Long Ago that were so dear!

Fall’n Silent, now, for many a Mould’ring Year,
O whither are ye flown? Come back,
And break my Heart but bless my grieving ear.

20

Some happy Day my Voice will Silent fall,

And answer not when some that love it call:
Be glad for Me when this you note—and think
I’ve found the Voices lost, beyond the Pall.

21

O sorry Spectacle of fallen Pride

Whom Men compassionate and Gods deride,
You valued Life! Go hide your humbled Head,
And envy those who in the Cradle died.

22

So let me grateful drain the Magic Bowl

That medicines hurt Minds and on the Soul
 Mark Twain’s Ruba’iyyat 257

The Healing of its Peace doth lay—if then

Death claim me—Welcome be his Dole!

23

O Death, sole Precious Thing in This World’s gift,

Behold us in this shabby Life adrift!
Have Thou our Worship—unto Thee,
Best Friend of Man, our tired Hearts we lift.

24

The Thoughtless—erring—Kings have Happy styled:

It is not true. They are beguiled
And swindled like the rest. There’s only One
Whose Life is wholly blest—the Still-Born Child.

25

I sometimes think, indeed that too much Grog

Did all too frequently my Vision clog,
And make my Gait eccentric—and the while
My mental Pharos smothered in a Fog;

26

Along the Earth’s Rotundity I reeled,

And swayed and swung my random Way afield
And reached my Home, which round me spun—
I watched this Sight with Wonder unconcealed.

27

There was the Door whereof I had the Key,

The Landlord too, who double seemed to me—
Some heated Talk there was—and then, ah then
But Rags and Fragments were we—Me and He.

28

Along the Earth’s Rotundity I reeled

And swayed and swung my random way afield
And reached my Home, which round me spun
I watched it, ah with wonder unconcealed—
258 Mark Twain

29

I sometimes think that never glows so red

A Nose as when, from Age’s Sunset shed,
Upon it fall belated Rays that tell
Of long past Orgies of a Prime that’s fled.

30

Into this Bawdy House, and Why, well knowing,

But Whence, for Wisdom’s sake not showing,
And out of it, the Wine exalting me,
I knew not Whither, windy went, a-blowing.

31

Myself when young did eagerly frequent

Some shady Houses, and heard Argument
About It, and about: by evermore
I liked It well, and often in I went.

32

And there the Seed of Prudence did I sow

And with mine own Purse tried to make it grow,
And this was all the Harvest that I reap’d:
I ordered Water, but Champagne did flow.

33

And so, in time,—this being noticed long

Ere I had noticed it myself—a Wrong
To my Good Name was done; and thus
I Sold my Reputation for a Song;

34

And those who husbanded their golden Youth,

And those who flung it to the Winds, forsooth
Must all alike succumb to Age
And know the nip of his remorseless Tooth.
 Mark Twain’s Ruba’iyyat 259

35

Each morn a thousand Mis’ries brings, rebel

And curse we as we may. Ah, well,
It still leaves those acquired before—how then
Is Old Age better than the threaten’d Hell?

36

Ah, now in Age a feeble stream we Piss,

And maunder feebly over That and This,
Thinking we Think—alas, we do but Dream—
And wonder why our Moonings go amiss.

37

The bleary Eyes and then the fumbling Hands

Come next in turn and mark the wasting Sands
Of that poor Life, a Wreck forlorn,
Dismantled driving toward the Unknown Lands.

38

The Legs Refusing further Duty, now

In lazy Bath Chair let the Old Man plow
Adroop and dozing up and down
The Sunny Side and warm his frosty Pow.

39

Next, Deafness comes, and men must Shout

Into a foolish Trumpet, leaving out
The Gist of what they want to say—and still
O’er what they have said hangs a crippling Doubt.

40

We talk of It, and in the faded Eye

By fitful Glimmers flashes Lechery:
Then Each his Face unto his Wall doth turn,
And some do moan, and some do softly sigh,
260 Mark Twain

41

Rebuilding Vanished Days—with films from Spain

When Flowers hid betwixt the Crotch did fain
Deflowering hold a happy thing to hap,
And with it cut—ah, cut and come again!

42

Some, being Fools and young, for Old Age hope,

Holding Life a “Boon” if they must even grope
Blind and poor and weak at ’tother End, —
wer’t e’en the End that terminates a Rope!

43

Our Sphincters growing lax in their dear Art,

Their Grip relinquishing in whole or part,
We fall a Prey to Confidence Misplaced,
And Fart in places where we should not Fart.

44

They say that He who dyed his Hair and wrought

To Keep his youth by Falsities, and brought
Sham Calves and such—why, that Wild Ass!
The Lizard dances on his grave—and ought.

45

Rheumatic Gout!—a momentary Taste

Of being dip’d in Hell full to the Waist,—
And lo, the mortal Misery has reached
The Limit of Endurance—O make Haste!

The Late Empress

For many years she has wandered

Europe under the concealment of a minor title,
as Halley’s comet might wander the
 Mark Twain’s Ruba’iyyat 261

skies under the concealment of a fictitious name.

Private hurt—not sane.
An Optimist is a person under 45.
A Pessimist is a sane person over it.
Newspaper is telephone which brings
daily the cries of the human race to your ear.
Life is 50 times the affliction it was 50 yrs ago—
in certain particulars. But it was always a burden.
We are all asses—the K on this throne and
We are all insane, but in different ways.
Jetzt ist die arme Kairserin in de Heimat.

[On another sheet:]

spiritualized
when made remote
for by some subtle law.
Lost? They have gained; all tragic human experiences
gain in pathos by the perspective of time. We realize
this when in Naples we must over the poor Pompeeian
mother, lost in the historic storm of volcanic ashes
18 centuries ago, who lies with her child gripped close
to her breast, trying to save it, and whose despair
and grief have been eternalized by the fiery envelop which
took her life but kept eternal her form and her features.

She moves us, she haunts us, she stays in our thoughts
for many days, we do not know why, for she is nothing
to us, she has been nothing to anyone for 18 centuries;
whereas of the like case to-day we should say “poor thing,
it is pitiful,” and forget it in an hour.

stand musing

[The following draft of Twain’s eighth quatrain appears

in pencil on the verso of the leaf containing Stanza 5:]

The joy of Life, that streaming thro’ their Veins

Tumultuous swept, falls slack—and wanes
The glory in the eye; and one by one
Life’s pleasures perish and make place for pains
262 Mark Twain

Note

  1. Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Ruba‘iyyat, intro. Alan Gribben, textual note by Kevin
B. MacDonnell (Austin, TX: Jenkins Publishing Co., 1983), 41–56. Reproduced courtesy
of the University of California Press.
 Glossary

Akhlaq-i Jalali: Written by Jalal al-Din al-Dawani (1426–1502 AD), this treatise
deals primarily with ethics and politics and includes a description of the
perfect ruler.
Al-Insan Al-Kamil: Arabic phrase meaning “Perfect Man,” was first used by Abd
al-Qadir al-Jilani. Often identified with Prophet Muhammad or Imam Ali,
it has been used to refer to the prototype of a Sufi master.
Arabian Nights: Also known as One Thousand and One Nights and dated as early
as the tenth century, the text is composed of stories and folk tales cen-
tered on the narrator Shahrzad. After its translation into various Western
languages, it contributed to the exoticized image of the Orient in the West.
Averroes/Ibn Rushd (1126–1198 AD): A twelfth-century Andalusian poly-
math who attempted to interpret and integrate Aristotelian philosophy into
the Islamic intellectual tradition in order to reconcile faith and religion.
His works cover a wide array of topics but he is primarily known as “the
interpreter” of Aristotle, and a bridge through whom Aristotelian philoso-
phy was transmitted to Europe. Some scholars believe that his influential
emphasis on rationalism contributed to the rise of the Renaissance in
Europe.
Avicenna/Ibn Sina (980–1037 AD): A Persian philosopher, he was the grand
master of Islamic philosophy who established the foundation of Peripatetic
philosophy (mashsha’i). His work synthesizes philosophers such as Plato and
Aristotle, while incorporating Neoplatonism and Islamic intellectual tradi-
tions. He wrote what is considered the most important medical textbook
of the medieval period, The Canon of Medicine, and several monumental
encyclopedic works on philosophy, metaphysics and logic.
Bhagavad Gita: Described by some as the “Hindu Bible,” this sacred Hindu
scripture thought to be composed between the fifth and second centuries
BCE. The text contains the essential doctrines of Hinduism and discusses
Hindu metaphysics, ethics and mysticism.

263
264 Glossary

Brook Farm: An experimental utopian community established in 1841 to facili-

tate the works of Transcendentalist artists and writers in an environment
of simplicity and equality. It was deemed unsuccessful and closed in 1847.
carpe diem: From the Latin capere (“to seize”) and die (“day”). The term origi-
nated with the lyric poet Horace and refers to the idea of living in the
moment. It was a common theme in Sufism that referred to Sufi meta-
physics, but the Transcendentalists somewhat erroneously understood it
thematically in the spirit of the Romanticism.
Code of Manu, The: An early and integral text of Hinduism, said to have been
written between 200 BCE and 200 AD The Code is structured as a frame
story of Bhrigu, Manu’s disciple, telling his own students the teachings of
Brahma that have been passed down to him through a sacred lineage. The
code sets forth rules about the four social classes, judiciary proceedings,
and a brief cosmography.
Corbin, Henry (1903–1978 AD): A French philosopher and theologian whose
encounter with Suhrawardi’s School of Illumination inspired him to study
and introduce Islamic philosophers to the Western academic community.
Firdawsi (Ferdawsi) (935–1020 AD): A Persian poet whose monumental
work, Shah-Nameh consists of several hundred thousand verses of poetry
on Persian mythology. He has been compared to Homer and is considered
to have been the father of Persian nationalism since his work preserved
a sense of Persian identity during a period of increased Arabic influence.
Ghazal: A poetic form characterized by rhyming couplets, a refrain, and a con-
sistent meter throughout. Using allegory and symbolism, the form of the
ghazal is often associated with poems expressing the pain or loss of love.
Gulistan: Literally meaning “flower garden,” this collection of poems and stories
was written in the thirteenth century by the Persian poet Sa‘di. Widely
quoted as a source of wisdom, the book primarily contains didactic apho-
risms and offers advice on a variety of quotidian subjects.
Hafiz (Hafez) (c. 1320–c. 1388 AD): Hafiz and his poetry are considered
supreme in the realm of Persian literature. Elevated almost to the level of
sacred scripture, his ghazals are characterized by a romantic sense of the
spiritual, incorporating themes of devotion to the Beloved. His extensive
use of such imagery as wine, women, and love-making are deeply rooted
in Sufi metaphysics and metaphor; these topics were initially taken liter-
ally by the English Romantics and later by American Transcendentalists.
One of the outstanding features of Hafiz’s ghazals is Divine Love and
Unity, a theme reflected in much of his poetry that was written in the
last decade of his life.
 Glossary 265

Hermeticism: This school of thought emerged in Late Antiquity, utilizing a

variety of Greek, Egyptian, and Near Eastern elements to create a philo-
sophical and religious system. The movement owes much to the large
body of Hermitico–Pythagorean literature, which greatly influenced West-
ern esoteric traditions during the Renaissance and Reformation.

Jones, Sir William (1746–1794): An English philologist credited with creating

the field of comparative linguistics as a result of his discovery of a proto-
Indo–European language while attempting to trace the roots of Sanskrit.
His translations of Indian and Oriental texts into English, including the
poetry of Hafiz, became highly influential for later Romantic and Tran-
scendentalist writers.

Neoplatonism: A philosophical school of thought founded by Plotinus that

flourished in Greece primarily from the third to the seventh centuries.
Plotinus, in his major work Enneads, provided a philosophical scheme
to bring about a rapprochement between metaphysics, ontology, ethics
and theology. For centuries, Muslim philosophers and theologians thought
Enneads was the lost work of Aristotle on theology.

Occident: A term used to distinguish those parts of Western Europe with roots
in the Roman Empire from the Asian countries and cultures of the “east.”
Most often used in a literary context juxtaposed with the term “Orient.”

Omar Khayyam (1048–1129 AD): An Iranian poet and polymath most famous
for his Ruba‘iyyat, a collection of poems written in quatrains. His popu-
larity as a poet often overshadows his prolific contributions to various
fields of science, including algebra, astronomy, non-Euclidian geometry
and calendar reform.

Orientalism: A generalized term referring to the use of images or aspects of

“eastern” culture in the work of Western artists and writers, particularly
those that associate the East with themes of exoticism and sensuality. Once
a form of artistic inspiration, it has since become associated with the ste-
reotyping of Eastern, particularly Islamic, cultures.

Perennialism: A philosophical-religious school of thought that posits the exis-

tence of a universal truth that lies at the heart of all the divinely revealed
religions. This theory in the modern era is used extensively as a model to
account for the sameness and diversity of world religions.

Plotinus (204/5–270 AD): The founder of Neoplatonism whose work ­Enneads

was compiled by his student Porphyry. The collection of lectures and debates
proved immensely influential to philosophers in the Jewish, C ­ hristian and
266 Glossary

Muslim traditions throughout the medieval period. His theory of emana-

tion, for instance, offered an alternative to the doctrine of creation ex nihilo.

Romanticism: A literary movement spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries that emphasized knowledge of oneself as gained through expe-
riencing nature. The movement also notably drew inspiration from a sense
of perceived exoticism from eastern cultures and literature. In turn, the
American Transcendentalists of the late nineteenth century drew heavily
from Romantic themes.
Rumi (1207–1273 AD): Perhaps the most well-known Persian Sufi poet, he is
often regarded as the “poet of love.” Rumi’s encyclopedic works of poetry
provide a remarkable commentary on Sufi and gnostic doctrine in Islam.
His poetry advocates tolerance, love, and the universal nature of truth at
the heart of all religions.
Sa‘di (1184–c. 1283 AD): A Persian poet whose poems show equal mastery
of the spiritual and mundane aspects of life, as well as a supreme con-
sciousness of the mutability of human experience. He masterfully utilized
poetic forms ranging from the lyric to the ode, and was noted for the
humor in his work.
Shah-Nameh: Literally meaning The Book of Kings, this monumental epic by
Ferdawsi (Firdawsi) offers three hundred thousand verses of poetry that
incorporate Persian mythology, cosmography, a mythography, and a histo-
riography. Having spent over thirty years composing this work, Ferdawsi
traces the history of Greater Persia from the creation of the world through
the heroic age that culminated in Alexander the Great, concluding with the
Arab conquest of Persia in the seventh century. The work proved pivotal
to the revival of Persian as a spoken language and to the preservation of
Zoroastrian legacy in Persia.
Shiraz: A city in the southwest of Iran, notable for its status as a creative hub
for poets and writers including Sa‘di and Hafiz.
sirr: An inner mystery, usually of an esoteric nature.
Spring: A common symbol of poetic inspiration often identified as a metaphor
for spiritual rejuvenation.
Sufism: A tradition that emphasizes the esoteric and mystical dimension of Islam.
Sufism highlights asceticism, purification of self, and esoteric knowledge of
God as means of achieving Divine Unity. Practitioners of Sufism or Islamic
mysticism can be found throughout the Islamic world today.
Swedenborgianism: Also called the “New Church.” The religious movement,
created by Emanuel Swedenborg during the eighteenth century, became
 Glossary 267

popular during the nineteenth century because of its associations with

mysticism, the occult, and alchemy.
Tamerlane (1336–1405 AD): A military leader whose armies conquered much
of Western and Central Asia during the fourteenth century, including Persia
and the Ottoman Empire.
Vedas: Literally the “Books of Knowledge” in Sanskrit, these works are con-
sidered to be the oldest of sacred texts, dating as far back as the middle
of the second millennium BCE. The four main Vedic texts govern the
priestly performance of rituals, hymns, and sacrifices. Their divine revela-
tion is disputed among Indian philosophies, only some of whom accept
the texts as spiritual authority.
Wahdat al-Wujud: The doctrine of the “Unity of Being,” often attributed to
Ibn ‘Arabi, provides the basis for Islamic gnostic perspective that proposes
all things are God but God is not all things.
Wine: The use of wine in Sufi Literature is often symbolic, rather than literal
gesture of partaking in a sense of divine ecstasy through intoxication.
Thematically, wine appears in most Sufi poetry and prose.
Zend Avesta: The sacred text of Zoroastrianism, written in the Avestan language
at an unknown date and allegedly containing writings by Zoroaster himself.
Though the initial date of composition was several millennia BCE, the text
was expanded and altered well into the fourth century AD.
Zoroastrianism: A religion based on the teachings of the ancient Persian
Prophet, Zoroaster (Zartusht), whose major tenets included good thoughts,
deeds and words. Monotheistic and dualist interpretations of the Zoroas-
trian religion exist, but both emphasize spiritual and physical purity.
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 Contributors

Mahnaz Ahmad is an independent scholar specializing in Comparative Litera-

ture and Middle Eastern Studies. Based in Washington DC, she holds degrees
from the Universities of Cambridge, Sussex, and Punjab. She has taught at the
University of the Punjab, King Saud University (Riyadh), and lectured at the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

Mehdi Aminrazavi received his early education in his native country of Iran
and completed his graduate degrees from the University of Washington in Seattle
and Temple University. He specializes in Islamic philosophy and theology, a topic
upon which he has published numerous books and articles, including Philosophy,
Religion and the Question of Intolerance (with D. Ambuel), Suhrawardi and the School
of Illumination, An Anthology of Philosophy in Persia, 5 vols. co-edited with S. H.
Nasr, and The Wine of Wisdom: The Life, Poetry and Philosophy of Omar Khayyam.
At the University of Mary Washington, he is currently a Professor in the Phi-
losophy and Religious Studies Departments, and co-director of the Leidecker
Center for Asian Studies.

Phillip N. Edmondson received his doctoral degree from the George Washing-
ton University where he also taught in the English Department. The author of
many articles, his literary interests include Asian influences on American literature.

Mansur Ekhtiyar received his doctoral degree in English literature. After teach-
ing at several Western universities, he returned to Iran, where he became a
distinguished Professor of English Literature at Tehran University. He specializes
in addressing major American literary figures, and has been credited with intro-
ducing nineteenth-century American literature to a Persian-speaking audience.

Massud Farzan is a native of Iran. He received his PhD from the Uni-
versity of Michigan, and has continued to develop his reputation as a con-
temporary Sufi poet, scholar, short-story writer, critic, and translator. In
addition to his popular work The Tale of the Reed Pipe: Teachings of the Sufis,

279
280 Contributors

he has written extensively on Persian literature. He is currently a Profes-

sor Emeritus of English at the Metropolitan College of Boston University.

Alan Gribben received his doctoral degree from the University of California at
Berkeley. Gribben is a noted expert on the life and works of Mark Twain, and
he co-founded and served as president of the Mark Twain Circle of America.
He serves on the editorial board of American Literary Realism, and is both
a Professor and the department chair of English and Philosophy at Auburn
University at Montgomery, where he has been recognized as a Distinguished
Research Professor.

Farhang Jahanpour received his doctoral degree in Oriental studies from the
University of Cambridge and was formerly Dean of the Faculty of Languages
at the University of Isfahan. He has taught at the universities of Cambridge and
Oxford and has also taught online courses for Oxford, Yale and Stanford. His
written works include editing Nuzhat Nama-ye ‘Ala’i, and a Persian translation of
Arnold Toynbee’s Civilization on Trial. He is an Associate Fellow at the Faculty
of Oriental Studies and tutor in Middle Eastern Studies at the Department of
Continuing Education at the University of Oxford.

Leonard Lewisohn is Senior Lecturer in Persian at the University of Exeter. A

renowned translator of Persian Sufi poetic and prose texts, he is the author of
numerous works among which we can name Beyond Faith and Infidelity, editor
of three volumes on The Heritage of Sufis, co-translator with Robert Bly of The
Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door: Thirty Poems of Hafiz, editor of Hafiz and the
Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry. He is the founder and editor of the
Mawlana Rumi Review, an annual journal devoted to Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273).

Parvin Loloi attended the Melli University in Tehran and the University of
Wales (Swansea), where she received her doctoral degree and wrote her disserta-
tion on the English translations of Hafiz and their influence on English poetry.
She is an independent scholar; among her publications we can mention Studies
in English and Comparative Literature; Hafiz, Master of Persian Poetry: A Critical
Bibliography; and “Tennyson, Fitzgerald and Conwell: A Private Relation with
Public Consequences” in Private and Public Voices in Victorian Poetry.

Jacob Needleman is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State

University. He was educated in philosophy at Harvard, Yale and the University
of Freiburg, Germany, and has taught in numerous national and international
Universities. He has also been a Research Associate at the Rockefeller Institute
for Medical Research, a Research Fellow at Union Theological Seminary, a
Professor of Medical Ethics at the University of California Medical School and
 Contributors 281

a visiting Professor of Religious Studies at the Sorbonne, Paris. Jacob Needleman

was also General Editor of the Penguin Metaphysical Library and the General
Editor of the Element Books series.
Among his numerous works we can mention The New Religions; The Wis-
dom of Love; Money and the Meaning of Life; A Sense of the Cosmos; Lost Christian-
ity; The Heart of Philosophy; The Way of the Physician; Time and the Soul; Sorcerers;
The American Soul; Why Can’t We Be Good?; The Essential Marcus Aurelius; and
his most recent book What Is God?

Marwan M. Obeidat is Professor of American Literature at the United Arab

Emirates University. He has published numerous articles and books, including
American Literature and Orientalism. He is currently a member of the Editorial
Board of American Studies International and the Organization of American
Historians; international co-editor for The Journal of American History, and also
for Connections: American History and Culture in an International Perspective.

Arthur Versluis received his doctoral degree from Michigan State University,
where he currently is a Professor in the College of Arts & Letters. Among his
publications are Magic and Mysticism: An Introduction to Western Esotericism; The
Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance; Wisdom’s Book: The Sophia Anthology;
Wisdom’s Children: A Christian Esoteric Tradition; and American Transcendentalism and
Asian Religions. He is the founding editor of Esoterica, and co-editor of Journal
for the Study of Radicalism. He is also the founding president of the Association
for the Study of Esotericism.

John David Yohannan was a pioneer in introducing Persian Sufi literature to

American literary circles. Born in 1910 in Dilman, Iran, he came to America
in 1919. He received his doctoral degree from New York University where he
studied Persian poetry’s reception in England. Having taught at a number of
major universities, he became a Professor of English and Comparative Literature
at the City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center, where he co-
founded the Comparative Literature Program. His books include Treasury of Asian
Literature, and Persian Poetry in England and America: A Two Hundred Year History.
 Index

Abstract of the Persian Theology of American Museum or Universal

Zoroaster, An, 118 Magazine, 4
Abu’l-Qasim al-Junayd, 28–29 American Transcendentalists and
Abu Talib al-Makki, 34–35 Sufism, 191–210; overview, 9, 191–
Academie des Inscriptions: (Zoroaster), 192; and Alcott, 196; and Alger,
57–58 196–197; and Conway, 9, 197–198;
Addison, Joseph, 91 and Emerson’s domination of
Adonais (Shelley), 30–31, 34, 35 Persian literature, 191–192, 198;
Adventures in Arabia (Seabrook), 186 and Hearn, 208–210; and Johnson
AGE–A Rubáiyát (Twain): complete (Unitarian clergyman), 198; and
version of, 253–262; selected Longfellow, 199–201; and Lowell,
examples of, 236–237; writing of, 201–203; and Whitman, 194–195;
233–234, 248. See also Ruba‘iyyat and Whittier, 195–196. See also
of Mark Twain; Twain, Mark Melville, Herman; Thoreau, Henry
Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, 25 David; specific names of writers
“Akbar’s Dream” (Tennyson), 39–40 Anagogic correspondences between
Akhlaq-i Jalali (Davani), 58 Sufi and Romantic poetry, 22–38;
Alcott, Amos Bronson, 9, 75, 109, overview, 22; Annihilation, Mystical
196, 215 death, Fana,’ 28–38; carpe diem,
Al-Da’mi, Muhammed, 175–176 22–23; Mundus imaginalis, 25–28;
Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 239–240 Nunc Aeternum, 23–25; Platonic
Alger, William Rounesville: and poetics and, 40–42
Emerson influence, 196–197; on Anagogic criticism, 19–21
Emerson’s Bacchus, 63–64; and “Animula,” section II (Eliot), 238–239
Hafiz, 204; and Omar Khayyam, Ansairetic Mystery, The (Randolph), 184
107; and Poetry of the East (Poetry Ansariyeh (Middle Eastern sect),
of the Orient), 9, 118, 196 181–182
“All Religions are One” (tract) Anti-Omarian movement, 242
(Blake), 40 Arabian Mirrors and Western Soothsayers
Alphonso of Castille (Emerson), 62 (Al-Da’mi), 175–176
American Civil War, 2–3, 222 Arabian Nights: popularity of, 213;
American Monthly Magazine, 4, 214 and Thoreau, 192

283
284 Index

Arcana of Christianity (Harris), 177 Book of Kings, The. See Shah Namah
Archetypal criticism, 17–19 “Books” (Emerson), 94
Aristophanes, 33, 96 Breath of God with Man, The (Harris),
Arnold, Sir Edwin, 209 177
Arte of English Poesie, The (Puttenham, Bring Me Wine (Hafiz), 63
tr.), 1 Brockhaus, F. A., 96
“Asia” (Emerson), 55, 56–57 Burrage, Charles, 223, 231
Asiatic Miscellany (journal), 3, 118 Bush, George W. administration, 176
Asiatic Researches (journal), 3 Byron, George Gordon, 34, 39–40,
Asiatic Society of Bengal, 3 69, 201
Atkinson, J. A., Esq. (translator), 214
Atkinson, James (translator), 118, 214 Cameron, Kenneth W., 56
Attar, Farid al-Din, 64 Carlyle, Thomas, 175–176
Avicenna, 107–108 Carpe diem (seize the day): anagogic
perspective of, 22–23; grand theme
Bacchus (Emerson): Alger on, 63–64; in classical English literature,
compared to Emerson translation 18; origin of, 2; and Victorian
of Saqi-Nameh by Hafiz, 136–141; audience, 246
and Hafiz’s influence, 8, 62, 135; Chadzko, Aleksander. See Chodzko,
text of, 134–136; wine as metaphor Aleksander
for spiritual intoxication, 140–141 Chamberlin, Henry Harman, 4, 227
Bangs, Edward, 64 Champagne Song of the Wine of Victory
Barrow, S. J., 237 (Chamberlin), 226–227
Baxter, Sylvester, 223 Channing, William E., 192
Bayazid-i Bastami, 169–170 Chardin, Sir John, 1–2
Bed of Roses. See Gulistan (Sa‘di) Chenu, M. D., 20
Benton, Joel, 117, 145 Chodzko, Aleksander, 118, 199
Billy Budd (Melville), 205 Cholmondeley, Thomas, 192
Bin Laden, Osama, 5 Christy, Arthur E., 56, 93, 196
Black Crescent (Gomez), 182 Clarel (Melville), 205–206
Blake, William: “All Religions are Clemens, Clara (daughter), 247
One” (tract), 40; and carpe diem, 23; Clemens, Jean (daughter), 248
on existence as thought, 27; Four Clemens, Samuel Langhorne. See
Zoas, 20; Hafiz and, 6, 19; Milton, Train, Mark
24; and Platonism, 16 Clemens, Susy (daughter), 248
Blavatsky, H. P., 185 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 16, 21, 26,
Blithedale Romance, The (Hawthorne), 27, 104
217 Comparative Persian-English poetics,
Blumen aus Morgenländischen Dichtern 17–22
Gesammelt (Herder), 91 Compensation (Emerson), 59
Body of the World (Sufi doctrine), Concord, Mass. See Persians of
37, 62 Concord
 Index 285

Conduct of Life, The (Emerson), 79–80, Druze (Middle Eastern sect), 180,
81 181–182, 185, 186–187
Confidence Man, The (Melville), 204 Duisberg, J. V., 91
Conway, Moncure Daniel, 9, 194, Duperron, Anquetil, 118
197–198, 233, 247
Coomaraswamy, Ananda, 21 Elements of Theology (Proclus), 24
Corson, Kate. See Randolph, Kate Eliade, Mircea, 21
Corson Eliot, Charles William (cousin), 237,
Costello, Louisa S., 214 238
Crashaw, Richard, 28 Eliot, T. S.: family interest in the
“Curse of Kehama, The” (Southy), 56 Ruba‘iyyat, 163, 237–238; impact of
Curtis, Elizabeth Alden, 247 Ruba‘iyyat on, 238–239; Khayyam’s
Curtis, George William, 9, 213, 215, influence on, 10; and Pound, 241
217 Eliot, William Greenleaf (grandfather),
237
Dabistan, The, or School of Manners Eliot Possessed (D’Ambrosio), 238
(Troyer), 118–119 Eliots, the, 237–239
D’Ambrosio, V. M., 238 Emerson (Hafiz echoed in verse of),
Davani, Jalal al-Din, 58 131–145; analysis of similarities,
Days (Emerson), 65, 67, 131–132 132, 134–135, 140–141, 142, 145;
Dehlavi, Amir Khusraw-yi, 60 and comparison with Hafiz poem
Demon’s Association, 238 in Persian Poetry, 142; and Days,
Der Persianischer Rosenthal, 91 131–132; and Fragmentary Bachhus,
Deveney, John Patrick, 183 141–142; and Ghaselle: From the
Dial, The (magazine): Emerson as Persian of Hafiz II, 132–133; and
founding member of, 109–110; “Give All to Love,” 143–144; and
“Saadi” published in, 8, 59–60, 94, “From Hafiz,” 66, 67, 130, 144;
99, 123 and “Hermione,” 143; and “To
Divan (Hafiz): and comparative J. W.,” 132–133; and May Day,
studies, 17; and Emerson, 58, 64, 134; and Mithridates, 62, 144; and
70; and English audiences, 1; and Monadnoc, 144; and Saqi-Nameh,
Hammer-Purgstall, 4, 118; and 134–136; uniqueness attributable
I-Thou relationship, 165; and Jones, to Persian influence, 131. See also
3; and transcendence of time, 23; Bacchus; Emerson, Ralph Waldo
unconventionality of, 155–156 (works of); Emerson on Hafiz
Divine Flashes (Lama‘at) of Fakhr and Sa‘di; Emerson’s writings on
al-Din ‘Iraqi, 33, 34 Persian literature; Hafiz
Divine Scintillations (Lawayih) (Jami), Emerson, Edward (son), 63, 117, 132
33 Emerson, Lidian (wife), 55
Dole, Nathan Haskell, 4, 223, 224 Emerson, Mary Moody (aunt), 75
Donne, John, 28, 31 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, and Whitman,
“Drum Taps” (Whitman), 163 155
286 Index

Emerson, Ralph Waldo (chronology transformation of Islam, 87. See also

of Persian mysticism interest), Emerson, Ralph Waldo (works of)
55–70; overview, 6–7; and Emerson, Ralph Waldo (Sa‘di and),
Arabian Nights, 56; and Asia, 57; 91–113; overview, 6–7; ambiguity
and college, 55; and Dehlavi, in attitude toward Sa‘di, 95–96;
60; and doctrine of “Beautiful comparison discontinuity of
Necessity,” 59; and Firdawsi, 65; themes in Persian poetry, 98–99;
and Gernado, 57; and Hafiz, comparison of Hafiz and Sa‘di
59–61, 62–64, 66–67, 69–70; by Emerson, 97–98; concurrent
and Hindu philosophy, 58, 69; study of Platonism, Neoplatonism,
mysticism studied (1858–64), 69; and Orientalism, 108; and Dante
and Neoplatonism, 58, 60, 69; and in Divine Comedy, 110–111; on
The Orientalist, 65; as Orientalist dictionaries and autobiography,
in 1845, 58; and Platonism, 61; 96; and “divine essence” as key to
and Plotinus, 57; and “The Poet,” Nature study, 109; and “flawed”
21–22; and Proclus, 60; and Rumi, reading of Platonism, 108–109; on
59, 61, 68–69, 118, 128; and “genius of Saadi,” 99; immersion
Sa‘di, 60, 61, 69; and Shah Namah, into study of Sa‘di, 95; Journal entry
64, 65; and Shakespeare, 61; and on affinity with Sa‘di, 112; and
solitude concept, 66; and Southy, “Nature,” 111; and Neoplatonism,
56; and Sufism, 5; and Thoreau, 106–107, 108; overview, 91–92;
60; title of “Master,” 6; and Wilk, and “The Poet,” 94, 112; and “P”
56; and wine as theme, 62–63; and on nature in The Dial, 109–110;
Zoroastrianism, 57–58, 61–62. See Qur’an compared with Plato by,
also under Hammer-Purgstall von, 109; Sa‘di and Hafiz widely read
Joseph; Journals (Emerson) in nineteenth-century America, 93;
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (Muslim Sa‘di as poet of Nature, 111; and
Orient and), 75–88; early interest Sa‘di on nature, 110; and Sa‘di
in, 6–7, 76, 118; and fatalism, popularity in America, 113; Sa‘di
80; and Hafiz, 82–83; on Hindu preferred to Hafiz, 112–113; and
mythologies, 75; and involvement Sa‘di revered by Transcendentalists,
with outer form of Muslim Orient, 111; similarities between Emerson
79–80; and Muhammad, 85–86; and Sa‘di, 95; and Trismegistus, 108.
and Muslim East as congenial, 87; See also Sa‘di
and Nature, 83; and Plato, 77; and Emerson, Ralph Waldo (works of):
pro-Western stance, 77–79, 87–88; Alphonso of Castille, 62; “Asia,” 55,
and quality of freedom of Persian 56–57; “Books,” 94; “Brahma,”
poets, 82; and Sa‘di, 82–83, 84; 61, 201; Compensation, 59; Conduct
and simplifications of Islam, 85; on of Life, The, 79–80, 81; Days, 65,
spread of Islam, 86–87; Sufi masters 67, 131–132; Fate, 59, 79, 80–81;
as ideal poets, 80, 83–85, 87–88; on Fragmentary Bachhus, 141–142;
 Index 287

Fragment on the Poet (on Sa’idi), 80, 82, 95, 97, 105, 119, 123. See
111; Fragments on the Poet and also Emerson, Ralph Waldo (works
the Poetic Gift, 119, 123–125; of)
Ghaselle: From the Persian of Hafiz English Romanics, and Platonism,
II (translation), 133–134; “Give 15–16
All to Love,” 143–144; “From English Romanics and Persian
Hafiz” (translation), 30, 66, 67, Sufi poets, 15–52; overview, 5–6;
144; “Hermione,” 143; Illusion, 61, anagogic correspondences between
81; Intellect, 144; “To J. W.,” 132; Sufi and Romantic poetry, 22–38;
Merlin, 62; From Omar Khayyam comparative Persian-English poetics,
(translation), 66; Orientalist 17–22; Platonic poets and anagogic
notebook, 127–128; Of Passionate criticism, 40–42; Platonism in
Abandonment (translation), 129– Romantic and Sufi poetry, 15–17;
130; Plato, 61, 78, 109; Preface to unity of religions, 38–40
Gulistan, 80, 82, 95, 97, 105, 119, Epipsychidion (Shelley), 24, 32–33
123; Shakespeare, 82; Social Aims, 85; Experience (Emerson), 62
Song of Nature, 65; Spiritual Law,
59; Superlative, 66. See also Bacchus; Fables of Pilpay, and Thoreau, 192
Emerson’s writings on Persian Faerie Queen, The (Spenser), 21–22,
literature; Journals (Emerson); Persian 31
Poetry; ‘Saadi” Far, Peter Lamborn Wilson, 35, 188
Emerson and the Persians (Russell), 155 Farzan, Massud, 17
Emerson as a Poet (Cabot), 66 Fatalism, doctrine of, 80
Emerson in Concord (E. Emerson), 63 Fate (Emerson), 59, 79, 80–81
Emerson on Hafiz and Sa‘di, 117– Ficino, Marsilio, 16, 31, 37
149; overview, 7, 117; Emerson’s Firdawsi, 1, 118, 194
encounter with Persian literature, Fitzgerald, Edward (aka FitzGerald):
117–119; Emerson’s translations and America, 198–199; and birth of
from Hafiz, 128–131. See also Omar Khayyam Club of America,
Emerson (Hafiz echoed in verse 222–223; and Eliot, 238–239; and
of); Emerson, Ralph Waldo (works Emerson, 199, 242; Emerson’s
of); Emerson’s translations from English translations preceded those
Hafiz; Emerson’s writings on of, 128; and Norton review, 237–
Persian literature; Sa‘di 238; and Pound, 241; quotations
Emerson’s writings on Persian from translations of, 18; reception
literature, 119–128; Fragments on the of in America, 245; Ruba‘iyyat
Poet and the Poetic Gift, 123–125; translation of 1859, 10; Ruba‘iyyat
the Journals (on Hafiz), 126–127; translation of 1868, 4, 202–203,
Orientalist notebook, 127–128; 209, 221–222; and Tennyson, 39.
Persian Poetry, 119–123; The Poet See also AGE-A Rubáiyát (Twain)
(poem), 125–126; Preface to Gulistan, “Five Boons of Life” (Twain), 234
288 Index

“Flaming Heart upon the Book and 67, 68, 69, 94, 95; and Hearn, 209;
Picture of the Seraphical Saint and Jones, 92; and Longfellow, 199,
Teresa, The” (Crashaw), 28 200; and Melville, 203, 205; review
Foote, Arthur, 223 of, 92–93; and Thoreau, 192; and
Four Zoas (Blake), 20 Whitman, 8. See also Preface to
Fragmentary Bachhus (Emerson), Gulistan
141–142 Gulshan-i raz (Shabistari), 1
Fragment on the Poet (on Sa’idi) Gurdjieff, 176
(Emerson), 111
Fragments on the Poet and the Poetic Hafiz: and anti-orthodoxy, 157; and
Gift (Emerson), 119, 123–125 Blake, 6, 19; compared to Sa‘di,
“Friend, Omar, thy voice is still 97–98; Emerson on, 119–121; love
singing” (Roe), 230–231 central to worldview of, 158–159;
Friendship (Hafiz), 66 and Melville, 203–205; and
“From Hafiz” (Emerson, tr.), 66, 67, mysticism, 156–157; and nostalgia
130, 144 of, 158; popularity of, 4; “Pre-
From Omar Khayyam (Emerson, tr.), 66 eternal” role of Beauty and, 36, 37;
Frothingham, Octavius Brook, 68 and Shelley, 37; and state of “not-
Frye, Northrop, 17, 19–20, 22 Being,” 161; as Sufi master, 1; and
Fuller, Margaret: and autobiographical symbolism of wine, 156–157; and
Leila, 216–217; as Eastern-like Tennyson, 39–40; unconventionality
mystic, 214; and Emerson, 58, 215, of, 155–156; universal love and,
217; and Persian influence, 213; as 153; as widely read in nineteenth
Transcendentalist writer, 9 century, 93. See also Emerson
Fusus al-hikam by Ibn ‘Arabi, 33 (Hafiz echoed in verse of)
Hammer-Purgstall von, Joseph: and
Garden of Mystery (Shabistari), 23, 29 Emerson, 4, 6, 58, 65, 95, 214–215;
Gentius, Georgius (Gentz), 1, 91 and Emerson tribute to, 119; on
German Romanticism, 215 Sa‘di, 92; translations from Persian
Gernado, Marie Josef de, 57 poetry, 4, 118
Ghaselle: From the Persian of Hafiz II “Haroun Al Raschid” (Longfellow),
(Emerson, tr.), 133–134 200
“Give All to Love” (Emerson), Harris, Thomas Lake: overview, 8–9;
143–144 Arcana of Christianity, 177; Breath of
Gladwin, Francis, 65, 69, 92, 119 God with Man, 177; and Brocton
Goethe, as Representative Men, 113 community, 179–180; controversial
Golden Child, The (Harris), 177–178 life of, 177; and doctrine of
Gomez, Michael, 182–183 counterparts, 178; and Fountain
Gribben, A., 233, 235 Grove community, 178; Golden
Guénon, René, 188 Child, 177–178; Millennial Age,
Gulistan, The (Sa‘di): availability in 177; and Oliphant, 179–180; and
Latin, 1, 91; and Emerson, 7, 60, Oliphant as disciple, 177, 178, 179,
 Index 289

180–181; philosophy of, 177–178; Illusion (Emerson), 61, 81

and questions on link to Sufism, Influence of Persian Poetry on Emerson’s
185–186, 188 Work in American Literature, The
Harvard College Library, 215 (Yohannan), 64
Hawthorne, Julian (son), 213 “In Praise of Omar” (Hay), 240
Hawthorne, Nathaniel: Arabian Intellect (essay) (Emerson), 144
Nights as inspiration for, 213; “In the Path of the Persians”
and Blithedale Romance, 217; and (Houghton), 223
Concord, 9–10; and Curtis’s Irving, Washington, 175–176
Nile Notes, 217; and German
Romanticism, 215 Jami: and Divine Scintillations
Hawthorne, Sophia (wife), 217 (Lawayih), 33; and Emerson, 7,
Hay, John, 240–241 118, 128; and Joseph and Zulayka
Hearn, Lafcadio: Asian literature (Yusuf va Zulaykha) (Jami), 35; Sa‘di
esteemed by, 209; and concept of compared to, 105; as Sufi master, 1
syncretic world faith, 209; exotic Jean, 36
background of, 208–209; and Johnson, Samuel (Unitarian
Ruba‘iyyat lecture, 209–210; and clergyman), 198
Stray Leaves from Strange Literatures, Jones, Sir William: and Emerson,
209 92, 118; “father of English
“Hearts of Gold” (Melville), 208 Orientalism,” 93; first reliable
“He is often happy whose one translations of Sufi poetry by, 214;
thought is for friends.” (Scofield), and Hafiz, 5; and Melville, 203; on
231 Sa‘di, 203; significance of, 3; and
Hellas (Shelley), 25, 27 Thoreau, 192; translations of, 92.
Herder, Johann, 91 See also Jones, Sir William (works
“Hermione” (Emerson), 143 of)
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, Jones, Sir William (works of): History
223 of the Persian Language, 92; “Hymn
Histoire Comparée des systèmes de to Narayena” (tr.), 55–56; Persian
philosophie (Gernado), 57 Grammar, 92; “Persian Song, A”
Historical Sketches of the South of India (Hafiz) (tr.), 3; Rain Drop The
(Wilk), 56 (Sa‘di) (tr.), 92; Scented Mud (Sa‘di)
History of the Persian Language (Jones), (tr.), 92; Works, 3, 92, 118. See also
92 Jones, Sir William
Holy Sonnet XIV (Donne), 28 Joseph and Zulayka (Yusuf va
“Honor of Old Age” Twain, 234 Zulaykha) (Jami), 35
Horace, 2 Journals (Emerson), Persian thought
Houghton, Stephan C., 223 in, 55–57, 59, 61, 62, 70, 126–127
Howadji in Syria, The (Curtis), 217
“Hymn to Narayena” (Jones, tr.), Karim, Abud’l, 65
55–56 “Keramos” (Longfellow), 200–201
290 Index

Khayyam, Omar: and Alger, 197; Literary “Masters”: Harris, Oliphant,

American reception of, 221; and and Randolph, 175–188; overview,
America’s materialism, 2–3, 222; 9, 175–176. See also Harris,
and Conway, 9, 197; and Emerson, Thomas Lake; Oliphant, Lawrence;
66–67, 128–129, 132; and English Randolph, Paschal Beverly
audiences, 1; and FitzGerald’s Loloi, Parvin, 17
translations, 4, 221–222; impact Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth: cue
on American audience, 10, 198; on Persian literature from Emerson,
and Longfellow, 200–201; and 199; and “Haroun Al Raschid”
Lowell, 202–203; and Melville, (text), 200; and “Keramos,”
205, 206–207, 208; and Omarian 200–201; and “Leap of Roushan
literary movement, 224–226; Beg” from Chodzko, 199–200; and
pessimism of, 223, 233; popularity “Spanish Jew’s Tale,” 200; and Sufi
of, 4, 221–222; and Stratton, poets in library of, 214, 215
228–229; and Thoreau, 18. See Lopez-Baralt, Luce, 17
also Eliots, the; Mark Twain and Lowell, James Russell: and Byronic
The Ruba‘iyyat; Omarian poets of affinity with East, 69, 201; as
America; Omar Khayyam Club of Emerson disciple, 9, 191; and
America; Ruba‘iyyat (aka Rub‘iyyat) Firdawsi, 201–202; and poems
(Khayyam) written in Oriental manner, 202;
Knickerbocker, 4, 214 and Rumi’s parable, 202; tribute
Konversations-Lexikon (Brockhaus), to Ruba‘iyyat by, 202–203; and
96–97 “Youssouf ” (Yusuf), 202
Kubla Khan (Coleridge), 104
Kurroglou, 199 MacDonnell, K. B., 234
Macrobius, 36
Laili and Majnun (Nazami), 214 Macy, Arthur, 223
Land of Gilead, The (Oliphant), Magia Sexualis (Randolph)
181–182 (Naglowska, tr.), 185
“Leap of Roushan Beg, The” Magister, Stephan, 232
(Longfellow), 199–200 Man the Reformer (Emerson), 86–87
Leaves of Grass (Whitman): affinity Mardi (Melville), 203
to Persian poetry, 164; city of Mark Twain: A Biography (Paine),
love projected in, 157; praise for, 234
163; publication of, 8; and Sufi Mark Twain and The Ruba‘iyyat. See
connection passed over, 164; and Train, Mark
Sufi-inspired poetry, 167–168; Mark Twain Project, 11
Thoreau on, 163–164, 194 Mark Twain’s Rubáiyát (Gribben and
Leila (Fuller), 216–217 MacDonnell, eds.), 234
L’Empire des Roses. See Gulistan Martin, Frederick R., 199
(Sa‘di) Marvell, Andrew, 19
“Lilacs” (Whitman), 163 Masollam (Oliphant), 180–181, 186
 Index 291

Mathnavi (Rumi), 1, 30, 33, 34. 169 Naglowska, Maria, 185

May Day (Emerson), 134 Natural Religion (Emerson), 79
May Day and Other Poems (Emerson), Natural Supernaturalism (Abrams), 41
65 “Nature” (essay) (Emerson), 94, 111
Meigs, Charles Hardy, 223 “Nature” (poem) (Emerson), 111
Melville, Herman: and Emerson, 9, Nature, Man, and Society in the 12th
191, 203, 207, 208; and Hafiz, 203; Century (Chenu), 20
on Hafiz’s wine, 204–205; and Neoplatonism: as common language
Holy Land journey, 205; and Omar for Romantics and Sufis, 6, 7, 15;
Khayyam, 206–207; and Persian and Emerson, 57–60, 69, 106–
Sufism, 175; and Sa‘di, 204, 205; 108; and Hafiz, 154; and mutual
and Sa‘di’s Gulistan, 203, 205; and philosophical heritage, 16–17;
superficiality of Oriental interest, Symbolist Mentality of Christian,
204. See also Melville, Herman 20–21
(works of) Newman, John Henry Cardinal,
Melville, Herman (works of): 175–176
Billy Budd, 205; Clarel, 205–206; “New Rosicrucians, The” (Melville),
Confidence Man, 204; “Hearts 207
of Gold,” 208; Mardi, 203; New York Magazine or Literary
Miscellaneous Poems, 207–208; “New Repository, 4
Rosicrucians,” 207; Pierre, 204; Nile Notes (Curtis), 217
Under the Rose, 206–207; “Rose Norton, Charles Eliot (T. S. Eliot’s
Farmer,” 207. See also Melville, cousin), review of the Ruba‘iyyat
Herman by, 199, 237–238
Memoirs of Khojeh Abdulkureem, The Notopoulos, James, 16
(Abdulkurreem), 65 Nott, John, 4
Menocal, Maria Rosa, 17 Nunc Aeternum, 23–25
Merlin (Emerson), 62
Millennial Age, The (Harris), 177 “Ode Translated from the Persian of
Miller, Samuel, 58 Hafez” (Nott, tr.), 4
Mills, Charles D. B., 198 Of Passionate Abandonment (Emerson,
Milton (Blake), 24, 29–30 tr.), 129–130
Miscellaneous Poems (Melville), “Old Age” Twain, 234
207–208 Olearius, Adam, 91
Mithridates (Emerson), 62, 144 Oliphant, Alice le Strange (wife),
Mohl, Jules, 209 179–181
Monadnoc (Emerson), 144 Oliphant, Anthony (father), 179
More, Henry, 40 Oliphant, Lawrence, 179–182; and
Mundus Imaginalis, 25–28 Ansariyeh sect, 181–182; and
My Boyhood Dreams (Twain), 250 Druze sect, 9, 181–182, 185, 186;
“Mystic Trumpete, The” (Whitman), and Harris, 179–180; and Land of
157 Gilead, 181–182; and Masollam,
292 Index

Oliphant, Lawrence (continued) Orient in American Transcendentalism,

180–181, 186; and questions on The (Christy), 196
link to Sufism, 185, 186, 187– Orient in Post-Bellum American Thought,
188; and Scientific Religion, 180; The (Johnson), 198
and Sympneumata, 180; syncretic Ouseley, Sir William, 4
philosophy of, 180; travels of, 9,
179 Paine, Albert Bigelow, 235
Oliphant, Mary (mother), 179 Pantheism, 155, 194–195, 202
Omarianism, 239 Paschal Beverly Randolph (Deveney),
Omarian poets of America, 221– 183
242; overview, 10, 221–222; “Passage to India” (Whitman), 194
The Eliots, 237–239; Omarian Perennialism, 3
poets of New England, 223–232; Persian Grammar (Jones), 92
Omar Khayyam Club of America, Persian Lesson, A (Whitman): as
222–223; Ruba‘iyyat of Mark coda for Leaves of Grass, 171; and
Twain, 232–237. See also Aldrich, mysticism of, 8, 160, 170–171;
Thomas Bailey; Eliot, T. S.; Hay, originally A Sufi Lesson, 164; and
John; Pound, Ezra; Riley, James pantheism, 195; publication of, 170,
Whitcomb; entries beginning with 171
Emerson Persian Poetry (essay) (Emerson): and
Omar Khayyam (Barrow), 237 admiration for Orient, 78; allusions
Omar Khayyam Club of America: to wine in, 62; and fatalism, 80;
beginning of, 4, 10, 222–223; on Hafiz, 81, 119–121, 122–123;
decline of, 232; Hay’s lecture publication of, 68; Sa‘di bypassed
at, 240–241; poems written for, in, 94–95
224, 226, 229; and Scofield prose Persians of Concord, 213–218;
dedicated to Burrage, 231 overview, 9–10, 213; Concord as
“One Hour to Madness and Joy” mecca of Transcendentalism, 214;
(Whitman), 156 and Curtis, 217; and Emerson’s
One Hundred Quatrains, from the English translations of Sufi poets,
Ruba‘iyyat of Omar Khayyam 215; and Emerson’s “Saadi,” 215,
(Curtis), 247 216; and German Romanticism,
On the Poetry of Mark Twain with 215; and Harvard College Library,
Selections from His Verse (Scott, ed.), 215; and Hawthorne, 213, 215,
233 217; and impact on New England
Oracles of Zoroaster, the Founder of the writing of nineteenth century, 215,
Persian Magi, 118 217–218; and Longfellow, 215; Sufi
Orientalia, 192–193 translations read by Concordians,
Orientalist notebook (Emerson), 214; and Thoreau’s identification
127–128 with Sa‘di, 215–216. See also
Oriental Translation Fund, 4, 214 Curtis, George William; Emerson,
 Index 293

Ralph Waldo; entries beginning Rain Drop The (Sa‘di) (Jones, tr.), 92
with Emerson; Fuller, Margaret; Randolph, Kate Corson (second
Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Thoreau, wife), 184, 185
Henry David Randolph, Mary Jane (first wife), 183
“Persian Song, A” (Hafiz) (Jones, tr.), Randolph, Osiris Budh (son), 184
3 Randolph, Paschal Beverly, 182–188;
“Philosophy of Persian Art, The”: admissions of as “mystic,” 187; and
(Coomaraswamy), 21 animal magnetism, 184; Ansairetic
Phoenix, The, 118 Mystery, 184; background of,
Pierre (Melville), 204 182–183; death of, 185; and Eulis,
Plato (Emerson), 61, 78, 109 186; and Harris, 183; and Magia
Platonism: and Emerson, 61; Sexualis, 185; as novelist of occult,
Emerson’s “flawed” reading of, 184; and questions on link to
108–109; in Romantic and Sufi Sufism, 185–186, 187–188; and
poetry, 15–17; and Shelley, 16, sexual philosophy, 187; and Sufism,
24–25, 32–34 182–183; and the Theosophical
Platonism of Shelley, The (Notopoulos), Society, 184–185; and travels of, 9,
16 183–184
Plotinus, 16, 57, 110 Recital of the Occidental Exile,
“Poet, The” (essay) (Emerson), 21–22, The (al-Ghurbat al-gharbiyyah)
94, 112 (Suhrawardi), 107
Poet, The (poem) (Emerson), 125–126 Representative Men (Occidental
Poetry and Imagination (Emerson), 62 biographical lectures) (Emerson),
Poetry of the East, The (Alger) (later 77, 108, 113
Poetry of the Orient), 9, 118, 196 Riley, James Whitcomb, 240
Potter, Alfred C., 223 Roe, George, 230–231
Pound, Ezra, 241–242 Romantic Movement, emergence of,
Pound, Omar Shakespeare (son), 242 93–94
Power (Emerson), 80, 81 Rosarium (Gentius, tr.), 1, 91
Preface to Gulistan (Emerson), 80, 82, “Rose Farmer, The” (Melville), 207
95, 97, 105, 119, 123. See also Rose Garden of Persia, The (Costello),
Gulistan, The (Sa‘di) 214
“Price, The” (Chamberlin), 226 Ross, James, 92, 118
Proclus, 60 Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain
Prometheus Unbound (Shelley), 22 and Ireland, 4
Prophet and a Pilgrim, A (Schneider), Ruba‘iyyat (Khayyam): and Emerson,
183 128, 198–199; and English
Puttenham, George, 1 audiences, 1, 198–199; and Hearn,
209–210; impact on American
Quatrains of Omar Khayyam of audience, 10; and Longfellow,
Nishapur (Thompson), 247 200–201; Lowell’s tribute to,
294 Index

Ruba‘iyyat (Khayyam) (continued) 99; read by Whitman, 8; and self-

202–203; and Melville, 205, 206, reliance in Sa‘di, 82–83; text of,
208. See also Omar Khayyam Club 99–104
of America Sacred Anthology (Oriental) (Conway),
Ruba‘iyyat of Doc Sifers, The (Riley), 197
240 “Sad, severed from the sea, a raindrop
Ruba‘iyyat of Mark Twain, 232–237; s‘’di: and Bustan, 21; bypassed
Conway on Twain and Khayyam, in Emerson’s “Persian Poetry,”
233; examples from, 236–237; 94–95; compared to Hafiz, 97–98;
omission of from Paine biography, and Emerson, 7, 82; Emerson’s
235; and request of Twain to burn, discovery of, 7, 94; as Emerson’s
235; themes of old age and death, ideal poet, 94; and fatalism, 80;
234–235; Twain’s reverence for the Herder on, 91–92; as insignificant,
Ruba‘iyyat, 233; Twain’s writing 92–93; popularity of, 4; as Sufi
of burlesque Ruba‘iyyat, 233–234; master, 1; widely read in nineteenth
work of “brooding late phase,” century, 93. See also Emerson,
235–236. See also AGE–A Rubáiyát Ralph Waldo (Sa‘di and); Emerson
(Twain) on Hafiz and Sa‘di
Ruba‘iyyat of Omar Khayyam, The Safavid Dynasty, 2
(FitzGerald, tr.), 4 “Sage’s Console” (Magister), 232
Rumi, Jalal al-Din: and death of the Sa‘id, Edward, 176, 217
“I,” 170; and Emerson, 59, 61, Saki Song. See Saqi-Namah
68–69, 118, 128; and Hearn, 209; “Salut Au Monde!” (Whitman), 155,
and Mathnawi (aka Mathnavi), 1, 157–158
30, 33, 34, 169; and Neoplatonic Sana’i (Sufi poet), 42
doctrine, 33; parable demonstrating Saqi-Nameh (Emerson’s translation of
Sufi pantheism, 202; and self- Hafiz), 64, 134–136, 140–141
annihilation, 30; as Sufi master, 1; Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy
translations as best sellers, 11; and (Wilson), 187
Universal mind, 27. See also under Scented Mud, The (Sa‘di) (Jones, tr.),
Whitman and Sufism 92
Rusk, Ralph, 242 Schneider, Hebert, 183
Russell, James, 155, 157 Schuon, Frithjof, 188
Ryer, André du, 91 Scientific Religion (Oliphant), 180
Scofield, William B., 231
“Saadi” (poem) (Emerson): admiration Scott, Arthur L., 233
for the FitzGerald Ruba‘iyyat Seabrook, William, 186–187
expressed by, 59–60; analysis of, Self-annihilation, shared concept of,
104–106; autobiographical nature 28–30
of, 7, 215; influence of The Saki Shabistari, Mahmud, 1, 26
Song, 64; on Nature, 111; on Shah Nameh (Firdawsi), 1, 64, 65, 118,
Persian poetry, 119; publication of, 198, 201–202, 209, 214
 Index 295

Shakespeare (Emerson), 82 Strangford, Lord Viscount, 164

Shakespeare, William, Sufi doctrine Stratton, Charles Haywood, 229–230
espoused by, 31–32, 36, 61, 82, 203 Stratton, George C., 228–229
Shapiro, Karl, 163 Stray Leaves from Strange Literatures
Shaykh Baha’i (Sufi poet), 38 (Hearn), 209
Shea, David, 118 Sufi Lesson, A. See Persian Lesson, A
Shelley, Percy Bysshe: and existence Sufism: Americn literary scene and,
as thought, 27; and Hafiz, 37; and 1–3; doctrines of, 154; German
Persian Sufi influence, 6, 16, 35–36; influence and, 4; and Sufi orders in
Platonism of, 24–25, 32–34. See Black Africa, 182–183; twentietieth-
also Symposium century version of, 4–5
Shirin Maghribi, Muhammad, 29 Suhrawardi, 107–108
Social Aims (Emerson), 85 Sultan Goes to Ispahan, The (Aldrich),
“Somehow I think that in the near 239
Beyond” (Scofield), 231 Superlative (Emerson), 66
“Song of Myself ” (Whitman), 164– “Supplication in the Time of War”
167; and ethnic scriptures, 194; and (Chamberlin), 227–228
Hafiz from Divan, 165; and lover- Sympneumata (Oliphant), 180
soul-deity, 165; mystical insight Symposium (Shelley, tr.), 16, 21, 24–25,
in, 153; and Rumi, 166, 168; and 31, 37. See also Shelley, Percy
sexual imagery, 165; and similarity Bysshe
to Hafiz, 153–154, 159–160; and
Sufi-inspired poetry, 167 Tagore, Rabindranath, 3
Song of Nature (Emerson), 65 “Tale of Hafez,” 4
Song of Songs, The (Whitman), 194 Tales of a Wayside Inn (Longfellow),
“Song of the Open Road, The” 200
(Whitman), 161, 163 Taylor, Thomas, 16
Sonnet 53 (Shakespeare), 31–32 Tennyson, Alfred, 39–40, 207, 233,
Southy, Robert, 56 245
“Spanish Jew’s Tale, The” Thompson, Eben Francis, 223, 247
(Longfellow), 200 Thoreau, Henry David: and Carpe
Specimen of the Popular Poetry of Persia Diem, 18; Emerson disciple, 9,
(Chodzko), 118 16, 60, 75, 113, 191; and “Ethical
Specimens of Ancient Persian Poetry Scriptures,” 8, 192; and nature,
(Chadzko), 64, 65 109, 112, 192; and Sa‘di, 164,
Spenser, Edmund, 21–22, 31, 32, 37, 193–194, 215–216; and Sufi poets,
201 164; superficial interest in Persian
Spiritual Law (Emerson), 59 literature, 192–194; and Walden,
“Star of Bethlehem, The” (Whittier), 164, 193; and A Week On the
195 Concord and Merrimac Rivers, 192;
Start With the Sun (Shapiro), 163 on Whitman’s Leaves of Grass,
Story, William E., 223 163–164, 194; as a Yogi, 192
296 Index

Thousand and One Nights, The. See Under the Rose (Melville), 206–207
Arabian Nights Unity of religions, 38–40
“To J. W.” (Emerson), 132 “Universal or Perfect Man” (Sufi
“To Omar Khayyam” (Dole), doctrine), 154
224–225 Users, 36
“To the Editor” (C. H. Stratton),
229–230 Vali, Seyyd Ni‘matullah, 67
To the Maiden in the East (Thoreau), Vedder, Elihu, 206
192 Voltaire, 91
Transcendentalism, American: and
Concord, 214; and Conway, 197– Walden (Thoreau), 164, 193
198; ebbing of, 203; and Emerson, Waste Land, The (Eliot), 239
242; and Islamic mysticism, 10–11; Week On the Concord and Merrimac
and Johnson, 198; and Melville’s Rivers, A (Thoreau), 192
satire, 204; and Neoplatonism, Westminster Review, 214
113; and New England School of, “When, on that Summer day at Twin
225; and Persian poetry, 198; and Oaks,” (G. C. Stratton), 228–229
Romanticism, 10; and Sufi poetry, Whibley, Charles, 239
3 Whitman, Walt (works of): “Drum
Transcendentalists and Minerva, The Taps,” 163; “Lilacs,” 163; “Mystic
(Cameron), 65 Trumpete,” 157; “One Hour to
“Transcendent Unity of Being” (Sufi Madness and Joy,” 156; “Passage to
doctrine), 154 India,” 194; “Salut Au Monde!,”
Travels of Sir John Chardin, The, 1–2 155, 157–158; Song of Songs, 194;
Trismegistus, Hermes, 108 “Song of the Open Road,” 161,
Troyer, Anthony, 118–119 163. See also Leaves of Grass;
Turner, Ross, 223 Persian Lesson, A; “Song of
Twain, Mark: overview, 10; copies of Myself ”
Ruba‘iyyat owned by, 247; examples Whitman and an All-Inclusive America
of burlesque verses by, 249–250; (Russell), 157
favorite Ruba‘iyyat verses of, Whitman and Hafiz. See under
245–246; first mention of Khayyam Whitman and Sufism
by, 10, 246–247; and indignities of Whitman and Sufism, 153–172;
growing old, 248; Khayyam’s style overview, 7–8; and access to Persian
and, 232–233; life-long interest in poetry, 194; and body and soul as
the Ruba‘iyyat, 10, 247–248, 250; “intimate lovers,” 159–160; and
poetic efforts not praiseworthy, comparative studies, 163–164; and
248; and Tennyson, 233, 245; Emerson as conduit, 155, 156; and
and writing of AGE–A Rubáiyát, “Graybeard Sufi,” 160; and Hafiz’s
248. See also AGE-A Rubáiyát; mysticism, 156–157; and paradoxes
Rubá‘iyát of Mark Twain of self-identification, 169; and
Twichell, Joseph H., 233, 246–247 A Persian Lesson (text), 170–172;
 Index 297

and reevaluation of Whitman, Whittier, John Greenleaf, and

163; Rumi and the conscious “I,” superficiality of Persian thought,
167–169; Rumi celebrates death 195–196
of the “I,” 170; and state of “being Wilk, Mark, 56
or not-being,” 161; and Sufism Wilson, Peter Lamborn, 187, 188
doctrines, 154; and vocative “you” Works (Jones), 3, 92, 118
of Sufis, 168; Whitman and the
divine, 160; Whitman compared to Yohannan, J. D., 64, 95
Sufis, 169; and Whitman echoes “Youssouf ” (Yusuf) (Lowell), 202
Hafiz, 153–155, 157–158, 161; and
Whitman on codified religion, 157; Zadig (Voltaire), 91
and Whitman’s meeting ground Zend-Avesta, 118
for all religions, 163–164. See also Zendavesta, Ouvrage de Zorostre
Hafiz; Leaves of Grass; Persian (Duperron), 118
Lesson, A; Rumi, Jalal al-Din; “Song Zoroaster, 59
of Myself ”; Whitman, Walt (works Zoroastrianism, 198
of) Zoroastrian scripture, 118