More Human/Humane than Humans: An Ecocritical Analysis of Shahryar's "Hail to Heydarbaba"

Abstract

Ecocriticism is a rather new insight into the relationship between literature and environment. In recent years, different environmental problems and devastations have led the critics to focus on the ecocritical concepts and terms in order to highlight the environmental challenges in literary works. In Iran, many poets investigate the natural environment in their poems, but still there is not the much ecocritical analysis on them. The researchers have chosen a contemporary Iranian poet, Shahryar (1906-1988), as the central figure of this study and examine his masterpiece, "Hail to Heydarbaba", under ecocritical perspectives. This poem is the material of the present study, to which we try to apply the ecocritical terms, such as anthropocentrism, anthropomorphism, ecocentrism, modernization, and place attachment. The writers attempt to settle on the particular aspects of ecocriticism in order to explore the poet's unique expression of ecocentric views for illustrating his appreciation of the non-human world.