Exact Repetition of a Historical Experience in the Creation of Poetic Images: An analysis of the stylistic position of Sorush Isfahani’s images

Mirza Mohammad Ali Isfahani, mostly known as "Sorush" and "Shams-al-Shoara" was one of the greatest poets of the literary return movement and the Naseri era. One of the factors of the fame and excellence of this poet's position among the literati was his ability to skillfully imitate former poets. Previous research indicates that Sorush was most inclined towards the poetry of Farrokhi Sistani. Based on a quantitative-statistical method and a stylistic approach, the current study tries to present reliable statistics on the amount of the poet's use of art and rhetorical techniques by examining the structure of the poetic images of the Divan of Sorush Isfahani. In addition to determining the level and quality of the structure of Sorush's images in terms of their simplicity or complexity, an attempt was made to compare the structure of his poetic images with that of the images of poets of preceding styles, especially by investigating the claim of the similarity of his poetry to that of Farrokhi. Based on our data, the images of Sorush's ghazals have the most complex structure, and the images of his masnavis have the simplest structure. The structure of images in Sorush's odes is surprisingly similar to the image structure of Farrokhi's, as if despite the historical distance, both structures belonged to the same poet, and this means an exact repetition of a historical experience in the creation of poetic images. The same thing happened in another aspect: The structure of images in Sorush's ghazals is exactly on a par with the structure of images in Saadi's ghazals.