About the Book The Middle Ages saw an extraordinary flowering of Persian poetry. Though translations began appearing in Europe in the nineteenth century, these remarkable poets - Omar Khayyam, Rumi, Saadi, Sanai, Attar, Hafiz, and Jami - are still being discovered in the West. The great medieval Persian poets owe much to the mystical Sufi tradition within Islam, which understands life as a journey in search of enlightenment, and, like their European contemporaries, they combine religious and secular themes. While celebrating the beauty of the world in poems about love, wine, and poetry itself, or telling humorous anecdotes of everyday life, they use these subjects to symbolize deeper concerns with wisdom, mortality, salvation, and the quest for God. This book has been a classic reference source for long time and its reprint shall be welcomed by the readers.
About Author Nathan Haskell Dole (August 31, 1852 - May 9, 1935) was an American editor, translator, and author. He attended Phillips Academy, Andover, and graduated from Harvard University in 1874. He received an honorary degree from Oglethorpe University in 1929. He was a writer and journalist in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. He translated many works of Leo Tolstoy, and books of other Russians; novels of the Spaniard Armando Palacio Valdes (1886-90); a variety of works from the French and Italian. Dole knew such literary giants as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (who was his father's instructor in Bowdoin College), Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., William Cullen Bryant, James Russell Lowell, Charles Anderson Dana, Walt Whitman, William Dean Howells, John Greenleaf Whittier, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Edward Everett Hale, Julia Ward Howe, Louise Chandler Moulton and many others. Dole died May 9, 1935, at Yonkers, New York of a heart attack.
Book's Contents and Sample Pages