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Concept
Diwan (poetry)
Summary
In Islamic cultures of the Middle East, North Africa, Sicily and South Asia, a Diwan (دیوان, divân, ديوان, dīwān) is a collection of poems by one author, usually excluding his or her long poems (mathnawī).
The vast majority of Diwan poetry was lyric in nature: either ghazals or gazels (which make up the greatest part of the repertoire of the tradition), or kasîdes. There were, however, other common genres, most particularly the mesnevî, a kind of verse romance and thus a variety of narrative poetry; the two most notable examples of this form are the Layla and Majnun (ليلى و مجنون) of Fuzûlî and the Hüsn ü Aşk (حسن و عشق; "Beauty and Love") of Şeyh Gâlib.
Originating in Persian literature, the idea spread to the Arab and Turkish worlds, and South Asia, and the term was sometimes used in Europe, not always in the same way.
The English usage of the phrase "diwan poetry" comes from the Arabic word diwan (دیوان), which is loaned from Persian, and designated a list or register. The Persian word derived from the Persian dibir meaning writer or scribe. Diwan was also borrowed into Armenian, Georgian, Arabic, Urdu, Turkish. In Persian, Turkish and other languages the term diwan came to mean a collection of poems by a single author, as in selected works, or the whole body of work of a poet. Thus Diwan-e Mir would be the Collected works of Mir Taqi Mir and so on. The first use of the term in this sense is attributed to Rudaki.
The term divan was used in titles of poetic works in French, beginning in 1697, but was a rare and didactic usage, though one that was revived by its famous appearance in Goethe's West–östlicher Divan (Poems of West and East), a work published in 1819 that reflected the poet's abiding interest in Middle Eastern and specifically Persian literature.
This word has also been applied in a similar way to collections of Hebrew poetry and to poetry of al-Andalus.
Ottoman Divan poetry was a highly ritualized and symbolic art form.
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