Literary Criticism in the Coffee Houses of Safavid Period

Literary criticism in its modern sense originates from the culture of the western world. However, it does not mean that Persian literary history has been without literary criticism. With respect to literary criticism and critical analysis of poetry, the Safavid era is one of the greatest periods in the history of Persian literary criticism. The most significant aspect of literary criticism practices of the era is striving to search for meaning and attempts at arriving at new themes but the issues of the reciprocal relationships between the poets and conformity to facts are two dominant themes of the literary criticism of the period. Coffee houses, as the most important and the greatest literary circle in Iran at the time, play a significant role in the literary arena. The researchers have tried to discuss the proposition put forward by scholars, “Literary criticism of this era is taste-oriented.” The present study strives to shed light on the literary criticism practices of this era which have not been investigated in detail. The analysis of the anthologies of Sfavid era and the content analysis of narrated stories of Coffee house literary criticism of this period in these anthologies reveals that literary criticism in coffee houses, following the tradition of literary orientations of the period, is meaning-oriented and the approach to criticism is based on literary tastes. Literary criticism as practiced in coffee house affects the poetry of the time in two ways: One is that, owing to the presence of the common people and their eagerness of listening to poetic recitations in coffee houses, many laymen have been led to poetry and as a result of accompaniment with the poets have tried to compose poems. The second strand of influence comes from the fact that mutual relationship between the poets and the audience in coffee houses partly determined the literary taste of the period and led to the type of poetry that had the audience in mind.