The Aesthetics of Influence: Corresponding Voices in the Poetics of Forough Farrokhzad and Female Romantic Sonneteers

The poetry of Forough Farrokhzad has for long provided the best repository of emotion and pure sense for the people who find themselves even slightly drawn to the world of literature. For decades Forough Farrokhzad has been able to entertain the minds and the hearts of all women and girls who find a piece of themselves somewhere along the lines of her poems. She can be recalled as one of the poets who introduced the female poetics to the poetry of Iranian contemporary poets. At a time where a woman’s voice was not allowed to express itself, in a society that was colliding under the pressure of social and political repressions, it was merely a miracle to see and to observe such pure feminine notions in the poetry of Forough Farrokhzad. One explanation as for the reason behind this sudden emergence of a poetic female voice in the poetry of Forough is that she was influenced by the poetics of female Romantic sonneteers such as Mary Tighe, Jane Cross Simpson, Mary Julia Young, and Agnes Strickland. As one studies the poetry of Forough Farrokhzad in close contact with that of her Romantic counterparts, one observes corresponding voices which is observed through similar outlooks on the part of the poets with regard to the matters of life, and especially love and relationships. The aim of this study is to examine such similarities in the poetry of Forough Farrokhzad and female Romantic sonneteers, in the light of Claudio Guillen’s theory of aesthetic influence, because as he stated himself the poetics of the Romantics is what that triggered the comparative study of literary works in the first place.

Keywords:

Female Poetics , Comparative Analysis , Forough Farrokhzad , Female Romantic Sonneteers , Claudio Guillen