The following is the full text of the speech delivered on July 12, 2014 by Ayatollah Khamenei, the Leader of the Islamic Revolution, in a meeting with poets. The meeting was held on the occasion of the birthday anniversary of Imam Hassan Mujtaba (a.s).
In the Name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful
First of all, I would like to welcome you. This is one of the sweetest meetings for this humble person. This meeting is like a banquet in which there are different kinds of meals, but which your appetite and capacity do not allow you to benefit from all of them. As a result, you rise from this banquet while you are full, but you are greedy to have more. We usually rise from this meeting with the same condition. Our capacity is full, but we still have the appetite and the interest to hear from you particularly because we can see that the movement and the caravan of poetry is making progress in the country. Today's poetry is not really comparable with our poetry 10, 12 years ago. It has thankfully made great progress.
I would like to congratulate you on the auspicious birthday anniversary of Imam Mujtaba (God's greetings be upon him) and I thank the dear friends in this meeting who commemorated the memory of that great Imam (a.s.).
I would like to remind you of the imminent arrival of the auspicious Nights of Qadr. You should appreciate the value of the Nights of Qadr. They are valuable gates that are opened to us. We should place ourselves on the path of the spiritual and holy breezes that pass through these gates and by Allah's favor, we should benefit from them. And I ask you to pray for this humble person. I hope that by Allah's favor, you will be successful.
Let us say a few things about poetry. In principle, poetry is an expression of poets' thoughts, feelings, melancholy and opinions. Allah the Exalted has given poets a power to express their thoughts, opinions, feelings and melancholy by combining letters, words and appropriate music in an eloquent and influential way. This is poetry.
Therefore, the function of poetry is primarily to answer the inner needs of poets. Poetry is a spiritual birth through which poets can reflect and produce - from the inside - certain concepts, teachings and realities. Through poetry, poets can express their melancholy. Therefore, if poets consider poetry to be a means for expressing their pains, sorrows and heartfelt emotions, this is not an unknown thing because this is the natural and primary function of poetry. Poets express their inner feelings with poetic words. However, this is not the major function of poetry.
The major function of poetry is the effect that your poems produce on the listeners. You occupy the listeners' privacy with your poetry. Human beings have a private territory. This is one of their characteristics. They have a private territory, a territory for their secrets, and a self. You show your presence in this private territory with your poems. You influence and enrich this territory. This is one of the most important functions of poetry.
With your poems, you can keep fresh this private territory, these most private moments of one individual - who has become your listener - and this stage, destination and position in a person's life. You can keep it pure, clean, delicate, enthusiastic and hopeful. You can give this individual food for thought. You can give him guidance because people's privacy is, in fact, their private think tank. Any individual has a think tank inside themselves and you can be a permanent member of this think tank with your poems. This can be done if your poems have the power to influence and to show their presence in the minds and hearts of people and listeners.
This is one of the most important functions of your poems. And this is an important issue because in fact, this privacy influences and builds inner selves. One's thoughts and important decisions are shaped in these private territories. Through this passage, people move towards true or wrong and good or bad paths. The territory is a place for making decisions and shaping the main identity of people. You can be present in this territory and influence it. And this is one of the most important functions of poetry.
This privacy is very important. Today, the effort of shaitans is to influence the private territories of people and listeners - either our people or other peoples. They want to inject their own values into them. They want to grab them in the claws of their own values and thoughts. If you can achieve the art and the blessing to show your presence in your listeners' private territories and enrich them with spirituality and with the tools that draw them to enthusiasm, hope, dynamism and progress, then you have made a great achievement.
This is what our great poets did during hundreds of years. Notice that Saadi, Molavi, Hafiz, Ferdowsi or Khaqani are present in our spiritual lives, minds and thoughts. They have managed to influence the mentality of our societies for hundreds of years. These are the people who preserved the true identity of national culture for us and who handed it down generation by generation. Today, this is the important responsibility of our poets. If people's privacy is preserved - you can play a role in this regard - then we can be hopeful about correcting social norms.
Social norms can be corrected in this way. That is to say, when people are corrected from the inside, when they become purposeful, motivated, hopeful and enthusiastic, we can hope that social disorders will be corrected and that social norms will move in their own line. This is one issue which is a great opportunity for you poets.
In my opinion, Allah the Exalted has given you this art of poetry. Perhaps, there are some people who have good thoughts, but who have no access to this efficient tool and to these eloquent, warm and influential vocal chords in order to convey such thoughts. You have these vocal chords. If you can make good use of it, you have accomplished a great feat.
Another issue about poetry is its social function. Poetry is the protector of national identity. It is the protector of national identity. The identity of nations is their cultural characteristics and privileges. This is what constitutes the cultural identity of a people. This cultural identity is a principle. If it is taken from a people, they will be digested. That is to say, they will be destroyed in the real sense of the word.
If it is taken from a people, they will be only a geographical entity. But this is nothing. In fact, it is something, but its existence is like non-existence. This cultural identity is the entire life of an organism and a people. Poetry can strengthen, enrich and feed this cultural identity. On the issue of cultural identity, when we look at the poets of our history - these great eloquent people - we see that their messages are very valuable. Their messages are about monotheism, belief in God and good deeds.
The collection of poems that exist in this regard are really and truly astonishing. I am not very familiar with the poems of other nations. Persian poetry - Saadi's Bustan, Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, Nizami's Khamsa, Hafiz's Divan and Molavi's Mathnavi - is full of wisdom compared to those foreign poems that I am familiar with. Wisdom radiates - in the real sense of the word - in these books and lofty thoughts. There are many outstanding and lofty thoughts in these books. They have managed to define an identity for our people.
And I would tell you that whatever privilege we have comes from this cultural identity. If it had not been for this cultural identity, our Revolution would not have achieved victory. If it had not been for this cultural identity, an Imam like our Imam (r.a.), who created and finalized the movement, would not have been created and built. Our magnanimous Imam (r.a.) was the product of this culture. It is this cultural identity that builds a person like Imam (r.a.) in society. Therefore, it should be preserved. You can preserve it.
Poetry should be the guardian of this identity and this identity is, in fact, the same as the spiritual wisdom on which we place great emphasis - that is to say, on the issue of spiritual and communal wisdom. This cultural identity is, in fact, the same as wisdom. You should preserve and pay attention to this in your poems. You should preserve lofty Islamic ethics, spiritual, divine and Islamic wisdom, monotheism, belief in God, justice, sincerity and all the things that exist in the glorious Persian poetry. And if this motivation is witnessed in today's poets and if they make an effort to pay attention to these characteristics, then the invasion that is launched against this center will become clear to them.
The problem with some people is that they do not see and understand the essence of this invasion at all. They do not understand the fact that there is a camp which has sworn an oath to uproot the national, Islamic and cultural identity of our people. There are so many signs, signals and traces, but they do not understand it. As a poet said, "Look at this flock. How comfortably it is grazing". They graze with no care and they do not understand at all. This is the problem with such people.
Naturally, poets feel this invasion when they are concerned about something and when they have a feeling thanks to their spirit of art and sharp eyes. Therefore, they try to confront this invasion. This is an important task: "In the Name of the God who gave us life and wisdom" [Ferdowsi's Shahnameh]. Poets defend and protect the lives and wisdom of our people. This is the characteristic of poetry - this lofty and valuable art.
Of course, the scope of this task is not limited to our people. It includes all of humanity. By taking a single look at humanity in today's world, we understand that it is a world of freeing the hand of transgression against all human values including people's material and spiritual values. It is a world of freeing the hand of transgression against the independence, wealth, religion, spirituality, naamus [one's wife, daughters and close female relatives] and morality of nations.
Global powers freed the hand of transgression with the tool of knowledge. This tool has brought them wealth. As a result of their knowledge, global propaganda is in their hands. Today, they are doing whatever they want to the world and they distort facts very easily.
Well, imagine that a person or even an animal is killed in a corner of the world. They create uproar about it. This is while it is several days now that planes have been attacking Gaza. Perhaps, more than a hundred people - many of whom are innocent infants and children - have been murdered, but this is not important to them at all.
I wish that they were only indifferent. According to what we have heard in the news, America and England have announced that they will support these invasions. This is the way of the world today. They support any evil, distortion, malevolence, corruption and dirt if it is to the advantage of their interests. And they are not afraid of this. They confront and savagely oppose any purity, any holy thing and any kind of honesty if it is not compatible with their interests. This is the way of the world today.
Well, what is the responsibility of poets - that is to say, people who enjoy wisdom, understanding and power of expression - in these circumstances? What should they do? Besides the fact that you can show what wisdom is - "Truly, poetry is wisdom" [Speaking in Arabic] - you can be a manifestation of "Indeed if any do help and defend themselves after a wrong is done to them, against such there is no cause of blame" [The Holy Quran, 42: 41] and "Those who defend themselves only after they are unjustly attacked" [The Holy Quran, 26: 227]. This has been mentioned in Sura ash-Shuara: "Those who defend themselves only after they are unjustly attacked".
You should be a manifestation of this. You should offer help. You should try to help the oppressed and you should tell and show the truth with your poems. You can play many roles in these areas. After all, having this advantage is a divine blessing and hujjat, and any blessing requires a word of thanks and a response. By Allah's favor, the dear brothers and sisters who are present in this meeting will pay attention to this issue more than what they have already done.
Of course, I fortunately see that the young poets of our Revolution are carrying out good tasks and they are composing good poems. It should be said that all these are true only when poetry benefits from art. This is a piece of advice that we always offer. Poetry is not only made of meaning and content. The main condition for poetry to be eternal and influential is form and artistic structure, method and framework.
I hope that Allah the Exalted bestows success on all of you and I hope that He approves of you. I hope that by Allah's favor, you will always be at the service of values, sacred beliefs, sincerity and truths. Tonight, we benefitted from the poems that you recited. I hope that God makes your voices warmer on a daily basis.
Greetings be upon you and Allah's mercy and blessings