Ayatollah Khamenei Urges Protection of Persian Poem Virtues

TEHRAN (Defapress) -On Wednesday evening, a group of poets and literary experts met with Ayatollah Khamenei, on the eve of the birth anniversary of Shiite Muslims' second imam, Hassan ibn Ali al-Mujtaba’s (AS).

In the gathering, the Leader hailed the young poets’ advances in working on the verbal and semantic aspects, urging them to try to safeguard the “chastity and modesty” of Persian poetry.

The Leader also noted that poets should feel bound to promote qualities such as “justice, resistance and moral virtues” in their literature, and cautioned against the attempts and plots by the opponents of the Islamic Revolution for impairing poetry and associating it with “superficiality in thought, insouciance in action, passiveness in politics, and indifference to confrontation with the enemy.”

In order to counter the hostile plots, the poets should focus on “wisdom, seriousness and endeavor and order in action, contemplation in thought, firmness of identity and diligence in the face of enemy” in composing poems, the Leader stressed.

In a same meeting last year, Ayatollah Khamenei had called on poets to focus on poems satirizing the contemporary world’s strange and bitter facts, such as the US partnership with Saudi Arabia or the kingdom’s election to the UN women's rights commission.

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