Romanticism, Realism and Symbolism in Manouchehr Atashi’s Poetry

The advent of Constitutionalism in Iran was the outcome of a paradigmatic shift in the worldview when contacted with western culture and literature. During the post-constitutional period the rise of journalism and translation of European works opened a new horizon before the men of letters. The reception of translations by journals and magazines during the Pahlavi I and II became increasingly exciting, boosting the growth of modernity. The western literary schools are the results of Enlightenment and its ontological shift. However, Iranians’ acquaintance with such new shifts had neither their philosophical backgrounds and social contexts nor their chronological order as it was with them in their birth places; that is why, such shifts have not manifested coherently and uniformly in our contemporary poetry. Nima’s collection of poetry in which different perspectives eclectically converged is an example par excellence. Manouchehr Atashi, a poet of the second generation of Nima-based poetry, was active in three fields of poetry, translation and criticism. The present research with a descriptive-analytical methodology aims to explore this eclecticism in Atashi’s poetry. The findings demonstrate that Atashi’s poetry basically enjoys a mixture of literary schools; that is to say, some Romantic elements in lyric poetry, climactic elements (local and urban) in realistic poetry and some social symbolic dispositions are reflected in his protest poetry. Nevertheless, from the second phase of his poetry, the frequency of Romantic themes is going up.