The influence of Persian literature in Western culture is historically significant. In order to avoid what E.G. Browne calls "an altogether inadequate judgment of the intellectual activity of that ingenious and talented people", many top calibre centers of academia throughout the world today from Berlin to Japan, have permanent programs for Persian studies for the literary heritage of Persia.
L.P. Elwell-Sutton, "distinguished professor" of Persian studies of The University of Edinburgh calls Persian poetry "one of the richest poetic literatures of the world". And Persian Studies professor Dick Davis of the Ohio State University states that relative to its scope, more of Persian literature has passed into the common stock of English proverbial expression and cliché than is true of literary works of any other language.
Read more about Persian Literature In Western Culture: Ancient Persian Literature, Edward Fitzgerald, Goethe, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nietzsche, Rumi and The Sufist Genre
Famous quotes containing the words persian, literature, western and/or culture:
“The threadbare trees, so poor and thin,
They are no wealthier than I;
But with as brave a core within
They rear their boughs to the October sky.
Poor knights they are which bravely wait
The charge of Winter’s cavalry,
Keeping a simple Roman state,
Discumbered of their Persian luxury.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A people’s literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.”
—Edith Hamilton (1867–1963)
“Signal smokes, war drums, feathered bonnets against the western sky. New messiahs, young leaders are ready to hurl the finest light cavalry in the world against Fort Stark. In the Kiowa village, the beat of drums echoes in the pulsebeat of the young braves. Fighters under a common banner, old quarrels forgotten, Comanche rides with Arapaho, Apache with Cheyenne. All chant of war. War to drive the white man forever from the red man’s hunting ground.”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)