Ahmad Shamloo - Biography - Young Poet

Young Poet

I, an Iranian poet, first learned poetry from the Spanish Lorca, the frenchman Éluard, the German Rilke, the Russian Mayakovsky and the American Langston Hughes; and only later, with this education I turned to the poems of my mother tongue to see and to know, say, the grandeur of Hafiz from a fresh perspective.

Shamlou's debut work, Forgotten Songs (Persian: آهنگ‌های فراموش شده‎), was a collection of classical and modern poetry which was published in 1947 with an introduction of Ebrahim Dilmaghanian. In 1948, he started to write in a literary monthly called Sokhan-no. Two years later his first short story The Woman Behind the Brass Door (Persian: زن پشت در مفرغی‎) was published. His second collection of poems Manifesto (Persian: قطعنامه‎), was published in 1951. He showed inclinations toward Socialist ideology. He rose to fame from his third volume of poetry, Fresh Air (Persian: هوای تازه‎), published in 1957. Zia Movahed, poet and philosopher commented that "Anyone who reads Fresh Air today can see that this language, this texture, is different from anything else. In contemporary poetry, few have accomplished this kind of rhythm as Shamlu has. Fresh Air was the greatest event in our poetry – after Hafez".