Two weeks ago, Iran’s foreign minister and nuclear negotiator, Javad Zarif, quoted the eleventh-century poet Hakim Abolghasem Ferdowsi. Photograph by Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty

In 1965, after a trip through China and Japan, the Iranian modernist Sohrab Sepehri found his voice. It could be heard in a new poem he had written, called “The Sound of Water’s Footsteps.” Sepehri puzzles over his identity as a writer, as a Muslim, as a widely travelled painter, and as a man from Kashan, where, in the seventh century, according to legend, Arab invaders intent on spreading Islam subdued the poet’s home town by throwing scorpions over the walls. Sepehri muses on the space race and “the idea of smelling a flower on another planet,” and he writes in free verse, inspired by Nima Yushij, a kind of Ezra Pound figure in the history of modern Persian poetry, who was inspired by the poetic notions of French Symbolists. Reflecting on a country with centuries of bumpy foreign contact, he draws out figures of confusion and displacement:

I saw a book with words made of crystal.

I saw a sheet of paper made of spring.

I saw a museum far from grass,

A mosque far from water.

Above the bed of a scholar in despair, I saw a pitcher brimming with questions.

Sepehri’s poem spoke to the alienation that many Iranians felt in the nineteen-sixties, as technology, literature, film, and imperial encroachments brought ideas from distant cultures to bear on the country’s traditions. Alienation eventually gave way to resentment and distress. Many people—poets, mullahs, and political dissidents among them—lamented what they saw as Iran’s increasing economic and cultural dependence on foreign powers.

Three years before Sepehri published his poem, in 1962, a short-story writer and critic named Jalal Al-e Ahmad published an essay called “Occidentosis: A Plague from the West.” In it, he diagnoses Western thought and culture, those insidious products of modernity, as an infection to be purged. A little more than a decade later, in 1979, Muslim revolutionaries in Iran used the same kind of language to promote their ideals. The ascendency of the conservative clerics who now rule the Islamic Republic appeared to signal a retreat from the modern world. The contagion had spread everywhere, they said, and the body politic needed to regroup. At present, although the mullahs never really cast off modernity, the influence of Western culture still raises the hackles of the Iranian leadership. Last summer, a representative of Ayatollah Khamenei compared Westernized Iranians to terrorists, and lamented that “Western liberalism has taken many of our youth.” Earlier this month, Khamenei, who, like his predecessor, composes his own amateur verse, spoke before an annual gathering of Persian poets. Some had trickled in from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Azerbaijan to seek the Supreme Leader’s advisement. “Today, with the development of new media technologies, certain people are creating poetry that deviates from a straightforward epic and revolutionary ambiance for the purpose of leading our precious youth astray and toward an unbridled culture that praises oppression, departure from humane norms, and yielding to the impulses of sexual instincts,” he told them.

Persian verse has sat squarely at the heart of Iranian political movements for centuries. In 1843, one British scholar marvelled, with mild exaggeration, that in Iran’s history “lives have been sacrificed, or spared—cities have been annihilated, or ransomed—empires subverted, or restored—by the influence of poetry alone.” In recent years, a rabble of academics, led by Ehsan Yarshater, the founder of Encyclopaedia Iranica and the director of the Center for Iranian Studies at Columbia University, have been steadily compiling a mammoth twenty-volume survey of Persian literature.* An entire chapter of the first volume, published in 2008, elaborates on common poetic images. (The eyebrow: “The most typical and handsome eyebrows of the beloved join together.” The mouth: “When the mouth smiles, it is like a half-open pistachio.”) The eleventh volume, on the emergence of modern Persian literature and the heady political milieu that has shaped it, is set to come out this fall.

Persian poetry has played a role in fusing and articulating Iranian politics in part because of its prominence in everyday life. When Iranians wish to back their nationalism with finer words, whether they can read or not, they may recall some old scrap of Ferdowsi, whose eleventh-century epic “Shahnameh” tells the story of Iran and its kings. Two weeks ago, Iran’s foreign minister and nuclear negotiator, Javad Zarif, released a YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw71HMKDpco) called “Iran’s Message: Our Counterparts Must Choose Between Agreement and Coercion.” He quoted the epic author as a capstone to his speech. “A thousand years ago, the Iranian poet Ferdowsi said, ‘Be relentless in striving for the cause of good / Bring the Spring you must. Banish the winter you should.’ ” In the final days of the talks, as diplomats from seven countries wearily ground away at the last few points of the deal, Zarif's wife, Maryam Imanieh, arrived in Vienna. She regularly parses the verses of the thirteenth-century Persian mystic Jalal al-din Rumi for the spouses of her husband’s colleagues, and *Zarif's Facebook page is dutifully trimmed with passages of Rumi selected by his wife. *The great works of Persian poetry are more than a heap of pretty images; in the depths of these lines, Iranians hear the echoes of their historical selves.

For centuries, many Persian poets sought or depended on the patronage of the court, and many kings, princes, and viziers thought of these poets as moral advisers and extensions of their authority. “He cannot choose but sit before the throne,” Ferdowsi said of the poetic profession in “Shahnameh.” (“Policemen were all poets when my father died,” Sepehri wrote, nine hundred years later.) But, as the British and Russian empires of the nineteenth century took land along the borders of the kingdom, the Shah opened the door to Western learning, and more and more poets shaped their rhymes around the political pains of the country as it wrestled with modernity.

Muhammad-Taqi Bahar, a son of Iran’s royal poet laureate—officially, the Prince of Poets—scribbled out his first poem before he turned ten; by the time he turned eighteen, in 1904, the Shah had appointed him to his father’s old position. Bahar memorized the greats of ancient Iranian literature, but he also studied French and pondered republican ideals. Although he molded his phrases around the ancient metres that had served Persian bards since before the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when Rumi and Hafez composed their masterpieces, he gradually began to fill his poetry with calls for a new kind of popular politics. And he did more than tie his thoughts together with clever rhymes. He joined the constitutionalists who established Iran’s first parliament after the revolution of 1906, started a newspaper to advance their reforms, and eventually took a seat in the new legislature. Bahar found himself in jail or in exile from time to time, but a well-crafted panegyric to the Shah usually helped to cut short his sentence.