The History of Literature in History: A Case of Historical Sources of the Tenth Century

The problem of the present paper is to searchfor literary history-related information in historical sources. The authors of literary history books mostly rely on Tazkirahs (Persian biographical works) as their main sources, whereas it is the history sources that, due to the validity of their subjects and also the direct relationship of their authors with governments, should be considered as one of the main sources. The results of the paper indicated that some literary figureswho have been neglected in the Tazkirahshave been introduced as poets in history sources. Moreover, thereare disagreements between the authors of historical books andwriters of Tazkirahs, on the one hand, and literary historians, on the other hand. Although literary historians may be right in many cases, historical sources cannot be put aside at all. The historical sources are important from the point of view ofaudience of poets, which is a central issue in the theory of modern literary history. The reports, judgments, and information of these works, as representative of the mentality of the historians towards poetry, can be analyzed as such. The present paper is divided into three main parts: neglected poets, main poets and the disagreements between authors of literary history and historiographers about them, and finally those figures that tried their taste in classical dominant discourses, but are not recognized as poets.