Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi

[8] By convention, poets writing ghazals often adopted poetic personas which they then invoked as pen names at the end of their poems, in what are called takhallos.

[11] In 1244 C.E, Rumi, then a jurist and spiritual counselor working at the behest of the Seljuk Sultan of Rûm,[12] met a wandering Persian Sufi dervish named Shams-i Tabrizi in Konya.

[25] In 1957, Foruzanfar published a critical collection of the Divan’s poems based upon manuscripts written within a hundred years of Rumi’s death.

Some Rumi scholars such as Rokus de Groot argue that Rumi rejects longing in favour of a divine unity, or tawhid, a concept which de Groot considers to originate in the Shahada's declaration that there is no other god save God.

[5] According to de Groot, Rumi holds that longing, being a lust to grasp something beyond oneself, necessarily creates a duality between subjects and objects.

[30] Vaziri posits that Rumi’s notion of love was a designation for the incorporeal reality of existence that lies outside of physical conception.

American Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman were acquainted with the Divan, and were inspired by its philosophical mysticism.

[33] Many late Victorian and Georgian poets in England were also acquainted with Rumi from Nicholson’s translation of the Divan.

[36] Publication of a twenty-volume English translation from the original Persian by Jeffrey R. Osborne was completed in 2020.