Criticism of Rhetorical and Stylistic Rubaiyat of Hafiz

This essay is to study the rhetoric and stylistic features of Hafiz's Rubaiyat. Although this literary form has not a major contribution in divan of Hafiz in comparison to his lyrics, but it deserves to get more attention, because this famous poet has blown part of his spirit and inner feelings into its existence. Assuming the validity of this attribution, it has been tried to analyze Hafiz's Rubaiyat from several perspectives such as content analysis, imaging, literary industries, and aesthetics to get a criteria making a scientific judgement. So, this essay has been divided and shown into three intellectual, literary and aesthetic categories. This study makes it clear that a great and famous poet like Hafiz wasnt successful, as it should be, in this literary genre (Rubaiyat), despite his unique capability and dominance on lyric as a literary form; the semantic mismatch of hemistiches, failure of symbols, and lack of logical reasoning behind these statements can be considered as some reasons.