Shaukat Bukharai, His Style of Poetry and His Influence on Ottoman Turkish Poetry

Shaukat Bukharai is one of the poets of the late Safavid period. His Divan consists of nine ode, lyric poems, quatrains, vocabulary, fragments of lyric poems, a piece and a chronogram. The most important feature of Shaukat's poetry is subtlety and imagination to the point of exaggeration. His mystical piety and admiration are evident in his poems. In fantasy, he has gone beyond other Indian poets, and sometimes this fantasy and the themes of his creations have taken his poetry away from understanding. To receive Shaukat's poems, one must find his imaginary world. Shaukat followed Saeb Tabrizi in poetry. In his Divan, besides Saeb, he also mentions Indian style poets such as Orfi Shirazi and Talib Amoli and Naziri Neyshabouri, but among the earlier poets, only the name of Hafez Shirazi is mentioned in his Divan. Although Shaukat is not well known in Iran, he had a large followers in Asia Minor and the Ottoman Empire. Among the Ottoman poets, three prominent poets are completely influenced by the style of Shaukat Bukharai. Shaukat's Divan has been translated and described into Ottoman Turkish several times. Today, most manuscripts of Shaukat's Divan are kept in Turkish libraries.