Ahmad Shamloo Biography

Ahmad Shamlou (Persian: احمد شاملو‎, Ahmad Šāmlū Persian pronunciation: [æhˈmæd(-e) ʃɒːmˈluː], also known under his pen name A. Bamdad (Persian: ا. بامداد‎)) (December 12, 1925 – July 23, 2000) was an Iranian poet, writer, and journalist. Shamlou was arguably the most influential poet of modern Iran. His initial poetry was influenced by and in the tradition of Nima Youshij. Shamlou's poetry is complex, yet his imagery, which contributes significantly to the intensity of his poems, is simple. As the base, he uses the traditional imagery familiar to his Iranian audience through the works of Persian masters like Hafiz and Omar Khayyám. For infrastructure and impact, he uses a kind of everyday imagery in which personified oxymoronic elements are spiked with an unreal combination of the abstract and the concrete thus far unprecedented in Persian poetry, which distressed some of the admirers of more traditional poetry.