Hafez received a classical religious education, lectured on Qur’anic and other theological subjects (“Hafez” designates one who has learned the Qur’an by heart), and wrote commentaries on religious classics. As a court poet he enjoyed the patronage of several rulers of his hometown Shiraz.
About 1368–69 Hafez fell out of favor at the court and did not regain his position until 20 years later, just before his death. In his poetry there are many echoes of historical events as well as biographical descriptions and details of life in Shiraz. One of the guiding principles of his life was Sufism, the Islamic mystical movement that demanded of its adherents complete devotion to the pursuit of union with the ultimate reality.
Hafez's principal verse form, one that he brought to a perfection never achieved before or since, was the ghazal, a lyric poem of 6 to 15 couplets linked by unity of subject and symbolism rather than by a logical sequence of ideas.
Traditionally the ghazal had dealt with love and wine, motifs that, in their association with ecstasy and freedom from restraint, lent themselves naturally to the expression of Hafez’s ideas.
Hafez's achievement was to give these conventional subjects a freshness and subtlety that completely relieves his poetry of tedious formalism. An important innovation credited to Hafez was the use of the ghazal instead of the qasida (ode) in panegyrics.
Hafez also reduced the panegyric element of his poems to a mere one or two lines, leaving the remainder of the poem for his ideas.
The extraordinary popularity of Hafez's poetry in all Persian-speaking lands stems from his simple and often colloquial though musical language, free from artificial virtuosity, and his unaffected use of homely images and proverbial expressions.
Above all, his poetry is characterized by love of humanity, contempt for hypocrisy and mediocrity, and an ability to universalize everyday experience and to relate it to the mystic's unending search for union with God.
His appeal in the West is indicated by the numerous translations of his poems. Hafez is most famous for his Divan: English prose translation, H. Wilberforce Clarke, “Hafiz Shirazi, The Divan” (1891, reprinted 1971). There is also a translated collection: A.J. Arberry, “Fifty Poems of Hafiz” (1947).
What others have said about Hafez:
Goethe: In his poetry Hafez has inscribed undeniable truth indelibly… Hafiz has no peer!
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Hafez defies you to show him or put him in a condition inopportune or ignoble… He fears nothing. He sees too far; he sees throughout; such is the only man I wish to see or be.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: You may remember the old Persian saying, 'There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub, and danger also for whosoever snatches a delusion from a woman.' There is as much sense in Hafez as in Horace, and as much knowledge of the world.
A. J. Arberry: Hafez is as highly esteemed by his countrymen as Shakespeare by us, and deserves as serious consideration.
Gertrude Bell: It is as if his mental eye, endowed with wonderful acuteness of vision, had penetrated into those provinces of thought which we of a later age were destined to inhabit.
Edward Fitzgerald: The best musician of words.
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