ملیحه مهدوی

Political poetry underwent considerable changes in both the format and the theme after the onset of the constitutionalism movement. While poetry and being a poet were commodities belonging to the educated persons until before constitutionalism. They made a lot of efforts in this period to get close to the language of the alleys and streets. In this era, political poetry seeks to express the people’s concerns and it becomes sublime with poets becoming the people’s tongue against superstition and despotism. Both prose and poetry experience subtle changes in this period. To be more exact, the constitutionalism’s literature is formed and enlivened in the course of the battle with the old literature and, due to the same reason, it is novel and it violates the tradition in terms of both form and content. The constitutionalist thinkers insist on pulling words out of the magnificent aristocratic palaces and making them serve the people of alleys and bazars. The goals of the poems in this period are awakening the people and inciting the national and patriotic feelings and promoting the individual and social freedoms and denial of the superstitions and loose and improper thoughts, fighting with the foreigners and westernism, harshly and mercilessly criticizing the disorders and familiarizing the people with their human limits and rights. It was with the constitutionalism’s revolution that the newspapers along with the preaching, discussion and lecture sessions became the primary medium for the conversations and expressing of the revolutionary notions and opinions, and a “public arena” that had been never seen before came about. More importantly, insolence, insult, and frivolity lost their private, fanciful, and exceptional aspects and became completely political and one of the most important and most effective means of the political fight. Such a thing was unprecedented in the political and literary history of the country. Two essential dimensions are seen in the constitutionalism’s literature: one is the criticizing of the past literature and the other is the positing of a novel literature. Zain Al-Abedin Maraghe’ei has the following words in this regard: “these days are not the time in which the masters of pen and thoughts spend their time on simple things, chimerical myths and senseless nonsense like their antecedents for nothing but fiction would result thereof. The present article tries introducing the prominent political figures of the constitutionalism era