Since the beginning of the Persian poetic tradition, “occasional” poetry has played a significant role in Iranian political, social, and literary life. Although it lost much of its literary prestige in the mid-twentieth century with the Romantic and Modernist valuation of “pure poetry,” the new holidays and heroes of the Islamic Republic have given a fresh purpose and status to commemorative verse. After several decades of speaking for the political opposition, modern Persian poetry in Iran now often serves as a means of articulating and celebrating the rhetoric and ideology of the government. This, too, marks a return to one of the principal functions of poetry in the classical tradition.
Perhaps nothing illustrates these developments more clearly than the outpouring of verse that followed the death of Ayatollah Khomeini on 4 June 1989. Within a year, a collection of nearly 300 elegies was published under the title Sugnameh-ye Emam (Book of Mourning for the Imam).