A Critical Analysis of Employing Romanticism in Identifying the Trends of Contemporary Poetry in Iran

The school of romanticism emerged as a dialectical reaction to classicism and neoclassicism in the eighteenth century and it was influenced by philosophical, political and social factors of its age. Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on individualism, the freedom of imagination, the sincerity of emotions and also the attempts to reach the transcendent truth, discernible beyond the scientific reality. Along with the formation of literary renaissance in Iran, many academians and literary traditionalists introduced modern literature as an imitation of the west in form of translations of western schools, including romanticism. Such an idea has been consolidated by the lack of valid and reliable literary research in the following decades. The current study has indicated that the interpretation of romanticism in Iran has been influenced by neglecting some of its essential characteristics, debasing its components from its philosophical and epistemological context and by inaccurate renditions of some of its core concepts. As literary schools contain conceptualized and structured components, literary research in Iran has seemingly employed this accessible structure in studying literary trends. Consequently, this has led to incomplete and even erroneous understanding of the trends of contemporary literature, due to focusing on sole descriptions of such elements as love and nature, without considering Persian literary traditions.