Symbols, Scopes, and Functions of Ismail Shahroudi's Social-Protest Poems

Ismail Shahroudi is one of the capable and community-oriented poets of new Persian poetry. His poetry often takes on the color of social symbolism. He is a humanist poet whose works are full of passion and social excitement, politics, struggle, and human emotions. The purpose of this research, was analysis of Ismail Shahroudi's poetry in terms of the qualities of symbols and their rhetorical and artistic roles in suspending meaning, providing semantic multiplicity, and explaining social and critical issues through a descriptive-analytical method. The research results showed that the use of symbolic images in his poetry based on his thoughts was a way to express and propose the topics and themes that he could not represent directly and clearly. It was a way to enter the problems and demonstrate the pains that the atmosphere of the society and authoritarians did not allow to approach. Shahroudi considered the symbolic approach as a window to seriously and humanely look at social and political issues, plan and explain them, and rebel, protest, and shout against adversity and disorder. He used all kinds of symbols like literary, natural, and historical symbols, etc. He also put them beautifully and consciously at the service of social and political issues. Despite the conventional usage of symbols in many cases to express his critical and protesting thoughts, Shahroudi achieved innovation in creating symbols.