Diwan (poetry)

In Muslim cultures of the Middle East, North Africa, Sicily and South Asia, a Diwan (Persian: دیوان‎‎, divân, Arabic: ديوان‎‎, dīwān) is a collection of poems by one author, usually excluding his or her long poems (mathnawī). These poems, frequently sung or set to music, were often composed and collected in the imperial courts of various sultanates and were very well known for their ability to inspire.

The English usage of the phrase "diwan poetry" comes from the Arabic word diwan (دیوان), which is loaned from Persian, and designated a list or register. The Persian word derived from the Persian dibir meaning writer or scribe. Diwan was also borrowed into Armenian, Arabic, Urdu, Turkish. In Persian, Turkish and other languages the term diwan came to mean a collection of poems by a single author, as in selected works, or the whole body of work of a poet. Thus Diwan-e Mir would be the Collected works of Mir Taqi Mir and so on. The first use of the term in this sense is attributed to Rudaki.

The term divan was used in titles of poetic works in French, beginning in 1697, but was a rare and didactic usage, though one that was revived by its famous appearance in Goethe's West–östlicher Divan (Poems of West and East), a work published in 1819 that reflected the poet's abiding interest in Middle Eastern and specifically Persian literature.

This word has also been applied in a similar way to collections of Hebrew poetry and to poetry of al-Andalus.

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