Where to start with Sufi poetry
Read the Coleman Barks Rumi for the music, then the Masnavi for the argument — and notice that both are the same poet.
You have heard Rumi quoted on Instagram, you suspect there is a serious religious tradition under the wallpaper, and you want a way in that meets the poetry as poetry without flattening the religion underneath.
Reading the Essential Rumi as if Rumi were a wellness poet, missing that every poem is sitting inside a serious thirteenth-century religious tradition. Or going straight to the Masnavi cold — six volumes of teaching poetry, full of stories, parables, and arguments — and concluding the deeper Rumi is impenetrable.
The reading path
- The Essential Rumi — Read a few poems at a time, slowly, aloud. Coleman Barks's versions are not literal — they are the Rumi most modern English readers have loved, and they are honest about being versions rather than translations. Use them as the door, not as the destination.
- Masnavi-ye Ma'navi — The deep-end Rumi — six volumes of teaching poetry, full of stories about merchants, parrots, lovers, and saints. Read in a modern translation with the stories preserved. Take it slowly, a book at a time. The argument is the form: every parable is doing the same work the lyric poems were doing in miniature.
Why this order
Rumi is one of the most read poets in the world right now and one of the most misread, and meeting him through the Essential Rumi first lets you fall in love with the music before the religion arrives — and then the religion is something you welcome rather than something you have to defend the poetry against.
Held back, and why
- Hafiz Poems — The other towering Persian Sufi poet, the lyric companion to Rumi's teaching voice. Not in this catalog yet, but the natural companion when it arrives.
- Conference Of The Birds — Attar's long allegorical poem about the birds searching for their king. Often paired with Rumi as the third great Sufi text. Not in this catalog yet.