An Investigation on Shamloo’s Poems using Critical Aesthetics

It can be claimed that Critical Aesthetics is the most important achievement gained from the Frankfort School. As critical Aestheticians believe, noble art should be able to free itself from homogeneity and similarity induced by dominant governments. It should, also, be able to actualize free meaning creation in a world where the origin of meaning is being devastated. In the present article, the art of Shamloo was investigated descriptively and analytically, from the stated perspective. The process followed was extracting case examples from the original text and analyzing them according to the theory. Since his poems are in close relationship with local texture of society, the study necessitates accessing sociological perspectives, as well. In this article, Shamloo’s versatile views toward prevalent semantic norms and the deficiencies of the modern society in this regard are categorized under different headings. His most frequent semantic norm breaking occurs in the domain of conventional ideological beliefs, binary contradictions, and the manifestation of the modern society. Here, Shamloo’s explicit objections target the values dominating the modern society. This way, his coherent thought construct is pictured behind his poems to help the reader to discover the ideology of his work and picture the poet’s world view.