Hafez

Hafez, born Shams al-Din Muhammad about 1325 in Shiraz, hardly ever left the city in his life. Of poor family, he worked as a boy in a bakery while studying hard, and learned the whole Quran by heart; the name Hafez means 'one who knows the Quran by heart'. He served for a time at court, and lived through the turbulent years in which Shiraz changed rulers again and again. His lyrics praise wine, love and the freedom of the spirit and mock religious hypocrisy, and are held to be the summit of Persian lyric poetry. To this day almost every Iranian household owns his Divan, and people often open it at random to take an omen from the verse. In old age Goethe was so moved by him that he wrote his West-Eastern Divan.