How did Rumi ever become the best-selling poet in America?
For hundreds of years Rumi has been one of the greatest poets of the Persian world. He’s sort of the Persian equivalent of Shakespeare, except that he’s more important than Shakespeare in a cultural sense. For example, in classical Persian music, you’ll find the poetry of Rumi turned into lyrics. But it doesn’t stop there; the poetry of Rumi even appears in Persian pop music that is being recorded today. And many Persians have memorized poems, or even entire pages, of Rumi. He’s still part of the living culture, even though he lived 750 years ago. Much of Rumi’s work had been translated into English decades ago by academics, but in literal translations that stripped the life and the poetry out of them. One day Robert Bly was speaking with Coleman Barks and he suggested that Barks work on Rumi and “release these poems from their cages.” And Coleman Barks certainly did breathe some life back into Rumi’s poetry. He began publishing Rumi in small editions over twenty years ago, and started
