Rumi: The Great Mystical Poet

For Valentine’s Day, here’s a Sufi poet that few students know by name but whose poetry they may have read.

His name is Jalaluddin Rumi. He’s a 13th century mystical poet and one of the best selling poets in the west.

The son of a Sufi scholar, Rumi, as he is known, wrote many poems describing his love of god. You can read many of his poems in Coleman Barks translation called The Essential Rumi.

In 2012, Krista Tippet discussed Rumi on her show, On Being, with Fatemeh Keshavarz, a professor of Persian & Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, and the author of a couple of books about Rumi.  You can listen to the show below. Tippet summarizes Rumi’s life in the first few minutes.

Here are a couple of good sites, if you want to explore Rumi’s poety on the web.

• Love poems of Rumi
• Poems of Passsion
• Selected Rumi Poems at On Being

You can find out more about Rumi at this BBC Religion site.