Robert Peters:

>>The harm of Beethoven is that most people don't like the music.  It thus
>>creates a schism between intellectuals and normal people.  This is bad.
>>Intellectuals are bad.  Intellectuals are troublemakers.  Normal people
>>are God's Gift.  Therefore, we really shouldn't have Beethoven.
>
>It doesn't take Beethoven to create a schism between intellectuals and
>normal people.  This schim will always be there.  And there will always be
>intellectuals.  Like me.  Troublemakres, eh? I take this as a compliment.
>(And the world would be much poorer without Beethoven, by the way.)

Apparently, irony gets lost in these posts.  Perhaps I should have put one
of those awful e-mail icons at the end.:-), ;-), |--b)

>>Of course I would, because Hafiz has influenced that tradition, especially
>>in the late 19th century and in the 1960s and 1970s US.  The "deep image"
>>school of American poetry came under Hafiz's (and Persian poetry in
>>general) influence, just as the late 19th century and the Twenties were
>>influenced by Japan.
>
>That doesn't make Hafiz a Western guy. He remains Oriental.

No, it doesn't make him anything but Persian.  However, his works have
to been absorbed into Western literature.  He has influenced Western
literature.  Westerners write haiku; Westerners also write ghazals and
pantoums.  I now forget the original point, but it seems to me the poster
was asking whether Hafiz was part of the Western tradition.  Yes, he was,
to the extent which that tradition incorporated his work.  He is also, of
course, part of the Persian tradition.  An analogy might be to English's
absorption of foreign words:  spaghetti, assassin, schmuck, restaurant, and
(in my part of the country) "Geaux LSU Tigers!"

Steve Schwartz