SOURCE: Robert M. Rehder, "The Style of Jalal al-Din Rumi," in The Scholar and the Saint: Studies in Commemoration of Abu'l-Rayhan al-Biruni and Jalal al-Din al-Rumi, edited by Peter J. Chelkowski, New York University Press, 1975, pp. 275-85.

Here, Rehder asserts that Rumi must be understood as a poet rather than a philosopher, and claims that "the structures of his poems are the structures of his unconscious phantasies."

Any study of the style of a Persian author is a particularly difficult problem at present because the literary criticism of Persian literature is a new and unexplored subject. The old, overall notions of Persian literature can now be seen to be wrong, but we still do not know enough to put anything new in their place. Above all, the need is for detailed studies. The greatest Persian poets, Mawlana included, are almost as unknown as the lesser.

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