Death and thinking about death in the poetry of Akhavan Sales, Shamloo and Forough Farrokhzad

Life and death have always been two important issues in scholars’ views; contemporary Iranian poets have looked at death from different perspectives. In this regard, three distinguished poets after Nima (Akhavan, Shamloo and Forough) are of paramount importance. In this research, using qualitative content analysis, three contemporary poets’ (Akhavan, Shamloo and Forough) thought and feeling about life and death were evaluated. In so doing, the themes of life and death in their poems were found and analyzed, and then in this way, issues like life, death, evolution of thought in the three poets, the world after death, and eventually martyrdom and fear of death were investigated. The findings indicated that the unpleasant image of life and hatred of death and sometimes fear of it, are more or less unchangeably present in Akhavan’s works, sometimes being mild and sometimes indifferent accompanied by sarcasm. But in Shamloo’s perspective, life with love is beautiful, and although sometimes it is unbearably painful, at the same time it is perfect and lacks nothing. To him, living in the midst of deception and oppression of society is the worst type of death and death for his belief is beautiful and impressive. He unwillingly accepts the natural death as the law of nature. Evolution is more vividly depicted in Forough’s perspective. She loves life with all its absurdity. At first, she likes death because of her weariness with life, but little by little death in her view becomes beautiful and is depicted by clear and poetic words.