ABSTRACT
The poets discussed in this chapter are essentially those quoted in Asadī’s Lughat i furs and in Rādūyānī’s Tarjumān al-balāghah, as well as a few others who can confidently be regarded as their contemporaries. Asadī’s work cannot be dated precisely, but its author was still alive some years after 458/1066. 1 It appears that Asadī continued to revise the work up until the end of his life and indeed that he left it unfinished at his death. 2 The family represented by the Vatican and India Office manuscripts contains a few quotations from poets of the first half of the 6th/12th century, namely a number of verses by Muʿizzī and one by Khātūnī. These are missing in the other manuscripts and evidently represent very early interpolations. Apart from these, everyone quoted by Asadī can safely be assumed to have made his name as a poet by the end of the third quarter of the 11th century at the latest. (This is naturally not true of the poets quoted only in the marginal additions to manuscript nūn, which have nothing to do with Asadī. These contain many samples of verse of the 6th/12th century). Rādūyānī’s work was evidently written after 482/1089 3 and in any event before Ramaḍān 507/1114, the date of the unique manuscript. Rādūyānī quotes on the whole the same poets as Asadī. To these two 11th-century sources we can add two from the 12th century, namely [60] ʿArūḍi’s Chahār Maqālah (completed in 552/1157) and Wāṭwāṭ’s Ḥadāʾiq al-siḥr (very heavily dependent on Rādūyānī) and finally two from the 13th, ʿAufī’s Lubāb al-albāb (the earliest Persian anthology) and Shams’s al-Muʿjam fl maʿāyīr ashʿār al-ʿAjam. These six books, apart from stray references in the early historians and, of course, from the surviving poems themselves, represent pretty much the sum total of what we know about the first two centuries of Persian poetry. It will become evident from the biographies that follow how very little this often is. Later sources are almost entirely dependent on ʿAruḍī and ʿAufī for the more-or-less authentic biographical information which they contain about the early poets, but this has been augmented by much that is uncontrollable and in most cases evidently false. They do, however, often quote genuine poems not cited by earlier authorities; particularly valuable for our purposes is the 14th-century anthology Muʾnis al-aḥrār by Jājarmī. The only later tadhkirahs which have consistently been cited in the present chapter are those by Daulat-shāh (15th century) and Hidāyat (19th century) and the information contained in these has been sifted with great caution. Given the scarcity of genuine biographical information no attempt has been made to arrange the following entries in chronological order; the ordering is strictly alphabetical. Anonymous works of the pre-Mongol period (which are generally even more difficult to date) will be found in appendix I.
