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My recent trip to Kazakhstan made me think about the role that poetry plays in different societies.

Here are examples from the 'field' that I've witnessed.

In Iran, I used to see ordinary people taking a book of verse by their greatest poet Hafez and opening it to a random page to forecast what would happen in their lives.

In Afghanistan I met a boy who knew off by heart any poems I quoted.

In Russia I used to know a group of people who had memorised Pushkin's poetic novel Eugene Onegin.

In France I was introduced to many famous poets who couldn't quote any poems in full , not even their own.

In Kyrgyzstan I met oral storytellers who knew the longest poem in the world called Manas. It consists of 2 million verses and is considered a reservoir of all Kyrgyz knowledge about the world.

In Britain... I better stop here and say that in different countries, poetry plays a different role. I tend to think that in more traditional societies, the role of poetry role is much more profound.

There's a theory in psychology which explores the relationship between emotions and information. In a nutshell it states: the more information you have, the fewer emotions bubble up. Conversely, the less you are informed, the more emotional you get.

This theory pretty much explains the more important role poetry plays in informationally less developed, traditional societies, where poetry replaces newspapers, entertainment and sometimes also liturgy.

In the 1960s, when hardly any news was circulated in the Soviet Union, poetry used to fill stadiums.

In Moscow nowadays you can hardly find more than 20 people gathering for a poetry reading.

The way poetry develops in closed societies is also very interesting.

In the Islamic word poets were the first adaptors and distributors of the new faith, especially outside the Middle East.

Thus the role of Ahmad Yassavi (an 11th Century poet for the Turkic-speaking world) and Mavlyana Rumi (a 12th Century Persian poet) in spreading out the Islamic
knowledge is so far-reaching, that both poetic books are called 'Quran' in their respective languages Turki and Pahlavi.

In order to transport a new faith to masses of people in their own language, the message has to be simple and clear, crisp and succinct. These poets were the great pioneers in doing just that.

But as the famous Hafez said in one of his poems:

'Love seemed to be so easy in the beginning,
but later all the problems descended',

As one starts to adapt one's own language and the respective mentality to spirituality, expressed in different language for a different mentality, the deeper one goes along this route, the more profound the problems he faces become.

It reminds me of the mystical poem by Fariduddin Attar (13th Century poet) 'Conference of Birds' which tells the story of 30 birds flying towards the King-Bird - Simurgh. On their journey they faced all kinds of difficulties and then discovered that they themselves were Si Murgh - 30 birds.

Dante's Divine Comedy or Milton's Lost Paradise are also examples of a certain language and mentality struggling with imported beliefs, trying to own them.

The more poetry fights this battle, the more complicated it becomes, and it turns into a highly coded language trying to replace sacred knowledge.

I have been re-reading Bedil - a famous Indian poet of Turkic origin, who wrote in Farsi and lived in the 17th Century.

His poetry is so dense and so well-packed, that there's a famous anecdote that one Bukharian scholar found 42 meanings in just one of his verses.

But then, another scholar from Kazan joined the discussion and found
another 40 additional meanings for the same verse.

Just to give you a glimpse of his poetry here's several verses, where
Bedil uses the image of a mirror.

Those who are looking with eyes of surprise, don't bother about eyelashes,
The room of the mirror is shut, no doors and windows there...

Or

The mystery of joy can't dismiss our sadness,
The breath can't become the air in the room of the mirror...

I leave it to you to interpret the meanings of those verses.

One could say that if before Bedil classical Muslim poetry was about the relationship between 'I' and 'He/she', between man and God, Bedil turned this relationship into 'I' - 'I', ie into autocommunication.

In this context the image of the mirror is the best tool to employ. But this kind of poetry does not sustain itself. Like heavy metal elements that turn radioactive and get depleted under the weight of their own mass, the same happens to poetry.

A new poet comes and starts everything afresh, as if nothing had existed before him. So then the whole poetic tradition is de-sacralised, not to say de-spiritualised, and the cycle begins anew...