From Influence to Confrontation: Hafez’s Creative Misreadings of Khwaju Kermani’s Ghazals in the Mirror of the Anxiety of Influence

Abstract

This article examines the intertextual relationship between the ghazals of Hafez of Shiraz and those of Khwaju Kermani based on Harold Bloom’s theory of the “anxiety of influence” and “creative misreading.” Bloom conceptualizes the creation of the later poet as the result of an agonistic struggle with the authority of prior texts, a struggle that unfolds through six revisionary ratios (Bloom, 1973; Bloom, 1975). The present study employs a descriptive–analytical method and draws upon an examination of ghazals composed by Hafez within the shared poetic “ground” established by Khwaju Kermani. The findings demonstrate that Hafez achieved stylistic and discursive independence not through imitation but through creative misreading. The analysis of poetic evidence indicates that Hafez transforms Khwaju Kermani’s mystical ghazal by shifting the semantic center, expanding symbolic structures, desacralizing didactic discourse, intensifying musicality and linguistic play, and spectrally reactivating tradition. Through these strategies, he relocates the inherited ghazal form into a new poetic horizon. Bloom’s theoretical framework also opens a new interpretive lens for understanding the dynamics of poetic inheritance in Persian literature. Within the Persian literary tradition, literary influence does not constitute merely a psychological burden; rather, it represents a cultural dialogue across generations. In order to establish his poetic authority, the Iranian poet must engage in a multilayered conversation with the past—sometimes through homage, sometimes through irony, and at other times through challenge. From this perspective, the relationship between Hafez and Khwaju Kermani, as well as other poets of similar stylistic lineage, serves as a microcosm of the evolution of Persian lyric poetry—a dialogue between imitation and innovation, between inheritance and freedom. The findings of this study suggest that Hafez’s greatness lies not in the rejection of prior tradition, but in its creative transformation. Through this transformative process, he reconstitutes the ghazal from a predominantly ethical–didactic mode of expression into a polyphonic and tension-filled poetic field.