Surrealistic Representations in Five Major Holy Defense Poets

Surrealism is a twentieth century literary movement in France whose main aim is to encapsulate pristine feelings and give rise to the automatic play of imagination. As a safe haven for people, Surrealism emerged following World War I and its concomitant repercussions in a bid to represent war anxieties, social inequalities, and imperialistic power. Now the question is whether or not the Holy Defense poems, written during and after Iran-Iraq war, also reflect surrealistic features. This paper tries to analyze and trace surrealistic tenets in the works of five major Holy Defense poets. The findings of the project demonstrate that these select poems possess some of surrealistic features such as automatic writing, humor and irony, love and madness and intoxication, imagination and hallucination, dream, fear and horror and anxiety, ambiguity, grotesque images, surrealism objects and sorrow.