The Iranian Poetry Culture Edition

On nationally memorized verses, communal grief, and fragmentation in the West.

Benoît Pellevoizin (BP) is a finance CMO who, in 2017 — shortly after the JCPOA — traveled to Iran to explore the country and assess potential business opportunities for opening a local office for a global creative agency. He also writes My Apophenia (myapophenia.xyz), a Substack where he gathers his thinking on geoeconomic issues, finance, and crypto.

A Divan, or collection, of Hafez’ poetry.

Benoît here. I was standing at the tomb of Hafez in Shiraz when I saw two young women crying. Not politely dabbing their eyes, but crying as if they had lost someone. Their shoulders shook. Their thick black mascara (khol) ran. They clutched a book of poetry.

It wasn’t a funeral. It was a pilgrimage in the name of poetry.

Hafez, the 14th-century master of the ghazal (a form of Arabic poetry that typically explores love and loss), is buried in a marble pavilion surrounded by gardens. His verses, equal parts mystic riddle and human longing, are as present in Iranian life as pop lyrics or football chants are in the West. People come here not just to honor him, but to stand in the gravitational field of his language.

One night in Tehran, a friend started reciting the work of another Persian poet, Omar Khayyam. One quatrain slipped into the next. Forty minutes later, she was still going, no pauses, no hesitation. These weren’t lines she’d crammed for a performance. They were simply there, ingrained since childhood.

Why is this interesting?

There are probably more copies of Khayyam’s Rubaiyat in Iranian homes than there are Qur’ans. That’s not blasphemy here. It’s where people turn for language that feels both timeless and personal.

Khayyam’s verses are famously ambivalent. He writes of sharab (wine), but the intoxication could be literal or could mean the ecstasy of love, or the rapture of the divine. You can’t always tell, and you’re not supposed to. That ambiguity is part of the genius: in a country where direct criticism can be dangerous, a double meaning becomes both survival strategy and art form.

This layered speech is everywhere in Iranian culture. Words are chosen with care, with a deliberate slipperiness that lets them live in two registers at once: the official and the personal, the public and the private. It’s how you can be both modern and sealed in a multi-millennial culture, how you can resist without confronting, by planting gentle suggestions that take root in the mind.

One afternoon in Shiraz, I walked into a garden and met a man with a small green bird perched on his shoulder. For a few coins, the bird would hop to a low table, pluck a folded slip of paper from a worn book of Hafez, and deliver it in its beak.

The paper held a verse. The verse, people believe, tells you something about your future. Nobody laughed, it wasn’t a superstition, and it wasn’t a party trick. It was another way poetry lives here: as oracle, as confidant, as map.

And it isn’t just poetry. Stroll through Tehran and you won’t hear Beyoncé drifting from cafés. You won’t hear Coldplay from car windows. The soundtrack is Farsi, always rooted in Iranian sound.

That absence isn’t state propaganda. It’s cultural gravity. The melodies and lyrics are part of the same shared reservoir that feeds the poetry.

It’s easy for outsiders to misread all of this as quaint or romantic, the tragic, lyrical East holding onto its old ways. But that’s the wrong framing.

Iran is hard to understand from a Western perspective precisely because it’s not just theocratic rigidity. It’s also a place where the younger generation often distances itself from official Islam and looks to something older: Zoroastrianism’s simple creed of think good, do good, be good.

That duality, the state on one side, a deep cultural identity on the other, shapes everything. What survives from the past isn’t museum culture. It’s alive, in circulation, woven into how people talk, flirt, argue, even make TV.

Iran has built a society around a genuinely shared language of meaning.

When that friend recited forty minutes of Khayyam without pause, she was drawing from a cultural reservoir every Iranian carries. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a living system where centuries-old metaphors decode contemporary feelings, where poetry functions as both personal therapy and collective resistance.

The West has gained individual freedom by fragmenting its cultural references. Your neighbor quotes Marvel movies while you reference an indie band. But Iran reveals the cost: we’ve lost the possibility of speaking a common poetic language. Our memes last months; their verses last millennia.

Political isolation has accidentally preserved something we’ve abandoned: the idea that an entire society can share not just values, but an actual vocabulary for the inexpressible. Censorship has forced poetry to carry impossible weight, making it simultaneously more vital and more subversive than anywhere else.

When those women cried at Hafez’s tomb, they were accessing communal grief that feels almost impossible in societies where everyone grieves differently, in curated bubbles of references and meanings.

The question isn’t whether we want Iran’s current constraints. The question is whether we can imagine recovering what those constraints accidentally preserved: a culture where poetry isn’t entertainment but infrastructure, where the deepest truths circulate not as personal opinions but as shared inheritance. (BP)