Influence in poetry is ‘slant’ and rarely a straight line. Like an echo—crossing languages, drifting through centuries, being heard as it reshapes itself for new listeners. The voices of Rumi, Hafez, and other Persian poets like Omar Khayyam or Sa’adi through their poetry did not arrive whole into American hands; it traveled indirectly, refracted through European Romantics, Victorian translators, and New England Transcendentalists, before finding fertile soil in the Beat Generation and finally in the varied terrain of contemporary American verse.

From Persian Gardens to European Pages

In the nineteenth century, Europe first opened itself to the lyric intensity of Persian poetry. Goethe read Hafez with devotion and responded in his West–Eastern Divan, creating a work that sought dialogue across cultures. Later, Edward FitzGerald’s interpretation of the quatrains or Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám captivated the English-speaking world. Though it was less translation than reinvention, it carried forward a vision of Persian interpretation of a concept the Japanese speak of as Mano no aware, the empathy towards the fleeting, wine, and fleeting beauty that felt deeply familiar to a Victorian audience already attuned to Romantic melancholy. Nicholson and Arberry did masterful translations of the majestic works of Rumi.

These works were more than literary curiosities. They formed a channel, through which the imaginations of Rumi and Hafez could begin to travel westward.

Emerson, Thoreau, and the American Spirit

It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who became the first major American voice to embrace these currents. Emerson read Hafez and Saadi not as an ornamental curiosity but with the resonance of almost like kin. He praised them for their spiritual independence and their union of wisdom with song. Thoreau, too, absorbed Eastern and Persian verse into his reflections by Walden Pond.

This absorption did not produce imitation but deepened a distinctly American current of spirituality—one that sought the infinite within the self and within nature. When Whitman opened Leaves of Grass to the universal self, his expansiveness felt uncannily aligned with Sufi visions of the divine: each fragment of the world shimmering with wholeness.

The Beats and Lived Immersion

A century later, the Beat Generation returned to the East as practitioners; Kerouac studied Zen, Snyder wove Daoism into ecological thought, and Ginsberg traveled to India, sat with sadhus, and later studied Tibetan Buddhism with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.

For Ginsberg, spirituality was not separate from poetics. His chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra, his partnership with Buddhist teachers, and his insistence on poetry as a vehicle of awareness all carried forward the sense—so central to Sufi verse—that poetry is lived practice, not merely composed text.

Through the Beats, American readers were prepared to welcome poetry as a site of meditation and transformation. By the time Coleman Barks’ versions of Rumi became popular in the late twentieth century, the ground had already been cleared: readers were ready to hear poetry as both art and spiritual encounter.

The Music of the Ghazal

Among Persian forms, the ghazal carries a special resonance. Each couplet can stand alone but unifies with the rest in a second line rhyme and refrain — radif . The effect is musical—anticipation, release, return. The refrain arrives not as a blunt repetition but as mantra, each time altering its shade of meaning.

The form enacts a paradox: unity through fragmentation, individuality within harmony. It is this very paradox that speaks to our fractured modern world. The ghazal suggests that harmony does not erase difference but emerges from it.

Agha Shahid Ali, the Kashmiri-American poet, reintroduced the ghazal to American poetry in English. His work made visible the music of this ancient form in a modern idiom, showing that it could carry its sonority into new contexts without losing its resonance.

A Closing Resonance

What arrives in American poetry today is not the Persian originals themselves but their echoes across time—Rumi’s longing, Hafez’s playful irony, the cadence of the ghazal—all refracted through the voices of Emerson, Whitman, Ginsberg, and Agha Shahid Ali.

The result is a body of poetry that does not merely describe spirituality but enacts it: through rhythm, through repetition, through the subtle harmony of form.

To close, let me offer a short ghazal that embodies this movement—a guest house where every presence, joyful or sorrowful, is welcomed into unfolding:

The Guest House of Possibilities

At dawn the threshold glimmers, each guest unfolding here,

The chamber of heart grows vast, its silence unfolding here.

One arrives with laughter, another with sorrow’s fire,

Both are seated as kin, their stories unfolding here.

Even the wind that passes, restless across the floor,

Leaves behind a hush of wings, unfolding here.

The walls are not boundaries but breaths becoming wide,

Every closed door softens, its hinges unfolding here.

Beneath this roof the eternal guest remains unseen,

Yet in each fleeting face, I find it unfolding here.

The ghazal does not conclude but continues to resonate. In its rhythm we hear what is most needed in our time: a subtle harmony that gathers difference into belonging, a guest house embracing every guest.