Forough Farrokhzad's and Simin Behbahani's Theoretical Approaches to Poetry: Textual and Metatextual

Forough Farrokhzad and Simin Behbahani are contemporary poets who have discussed poetry in both their poems and paratexts like lectures, interviews, letters and articles. These theoretical remarks are worth attention from a number of perspectives particularly because of their being poets. In this paper, in addition to introducing and comparing their textual and paratextual comments, we endeavor to study how their theoretical comments are different from the classical and canonical ones. The result shows that Forough and Simin, along with similar theoretical outlooks, have come up with different degrees of authority over the classical theories. The views of both poets on the nature of poetry, the nature of the poet as well as the content are almost similar. Despite their similarities, their views on language, music, and form have a clear difference. Forough is the follower of Nima and in her theoretical remarks puts aside tradition in all aspects of poetry. Contrary to Forough’s fragmentary poetry, Simin’s poetry remains to be just a metamorphosis. She sometimes, and in some cases, eliminates the definitive boundaries of the traditional poetic and allows for innovation