Description: The Middle Ages saw an extraordinary flowering of Persian poetry. Though translations began appearing in Europe in the nineteenth century, these remarkable poems are still being discovered in the West. Like their European contemporaries, the great Persian poets -- Omar, Rumi, Hafiz, and many others -- combined religious and secular themes. These writers owe much to the mystical Sufi tradition within Islam, which understands life as a journey in search of enlightenment. While celebrating the beauty of the world in poems about love, wine, and poetry itself, or telling humorous anecdotes of everyday life, they use this material to symbolize deeper concerns with wisdom, mortality, salvation, and the quest for God.

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