Hafez

Hafez, born Khwaja Shams-ud-Din Muhammad, was a Persian lyric poet of the fourteenth century, living and working in the city of Shiraz, whose exact birth year is not known with certainty and is usually placed sometime in the early 1300s. His collected poems, gathered after his death into the "Divan-e Hafez," are composed mostly in the ghazal form, a short lyric structure traditionally used for themes of love and longing, which he filled with layered imagery combining romantic love, mystical Sufi devotion, praise of wine, and pointed, often satirical criticism of religious hypocrisy among the clergy of his time. His verse is prized in the Persian literary tradition for its dense wordplay and ambiguity, allowing individual lines to be read simultaneously as romantic, mystical or worldly, a quality that has made his poetry the subject of centuries of commentary and popular divination practice in Iran, where a copy of the Divan is still kept in many homes alongside the Quran and consulted for guidance by opening it at random. His influence extended well beyond Persian-speaking lands, most notably shaping the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose own "West-Eastern Divan" was directly inspired by a German translation of Hafez's work. Hafez died in Shiraz in the late fourteenth century and remains one of the most widely read and quoted poets in the Persian-speaking world today.