The Politics of Love in Ahmad Shamlou’s Romances

Lyrical literature and hence romantic poetry is a collection of feelings, emotions and representations of human relationships which has been widely used in different eras and discourses with various even conflicting functions and manifestations. Romantic poetry, distancing from political poetry, discusses politics of literature rather than political literature. However, modern Iranian poetry, deeply connected with politics and protest literature, establishes a different relation between dramatic poetry and political poetry. Shamlou is one of the prominent poets of political poetry whose antagonism and political conflicts are sources of metaphors and constructions in romance. This paper, based on critical discourse analysis, emphasizing the concept of "antagonism" as a key concept in politics, shows that politics is related to romance in two ways. First, such romances are new experiences to represent human relationships. Second, they are against traditional literature, since Shamlou by changing the rhetoric of romantic poetry created a type of literature that is romance in surface but resistance literature in depth.