Crisis or Revolution Investigating the revolutionary change in Nima’s poetry in light of Thomas Kohen’s

Thomas Kuhn, the well-known theorist of philosophy of science, believes that the development of a science happens when its paradigms fail and it is replaced by the principles of its rival. According to Kuhn the development of a science is not uniform but has alternating ‘normal’ and ‘revolutionary’ (or ‘extraordinary’) phases. Kuhn’s theory is so flexible that it can be used to explain revolutionary developments in any other area including literature. Accordingly, it is viable to analyze how traditional Persian poetry changes to modern poetry in light of Kuhn’s theory. The question is whether the transformation created by Nima in Persian poetry has the characteristics of the Kuhnian revolutionary phase. If not, Should we doubt his title “ the father of new Persian poetry”? The present article investigates the revolutionary or non-revolutionary features of Nima’s poetry according to Kuhn’s theory. It is suggested that his poetry can be positioned as having the characteristics of the “crisis phase” than including those of the “revolutionary phase”.