Poetry for Mahmud Kianush is the language of the childhood of historical man. He believes the first human beings began to understand the universe and their own existence by the poetical interpretation of everything they saw and felt, and that this is what real poets have always done – and will always do.
In a country like Iran where since the late nineteenth century people and particularly the intelligentsia have been by possessed by the politics of freedom and social change, Kianush is prominent among the few poets who have not sacrificed the universal principles of the art of poetry for the pleasure of temporal popularity. He agrees with the ancient idea that ‘man is a political animal’, but he adds that man must remain faithful to his primordial nature and first be a poet.
“With my English poems,” he says, “I want to greet the people of my second home in a simple language and let them know that I am a Persian poet.”