40 Years of Silence, Then Genius

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Hafiz, a 14th-century Persian poet from Shiraz, memorized the Quran at age seven and spent his life in wine taverns, where he transformed earthly love into divine longing through his poetry. After forty years of submitting poems to master Mohammed Attar without response, Hafiz spent a night in vigil at a saint's tomb, and Attar appeared at dawn to give him a sweet, after which Hafiz wrote some of the greatest lyric poetry in the Persian language. His genius lies in his dual-level poetry where earthly love and divine love are simultaneously true, making him a peer to Goethe, a favorite of Emerson, and a reader of Nietzsche.