SOURCE: "The Ghazal as Fiction: Implied Speakers and Implied Audience in Hafiz's Ghazals," in Intoxication, Earthly and Heavenly: Seven Studies on the Poet Hafiz of Shiraz, edited by Michael Glünz and J. Christoph Burgel, Peter Lang, Inc., 1991, pp. 89-103.

In the following essay, Meisami argues for taking a literary—as opposed to a biographical or allegorical—approach to studying the relationship between speaker and audience in Hafzz's poetry.

Since Roger Lescot called attention to the plurality of the object or addressee of Hafiz's ghazals, it has become commonplace to speak of parallelism between the ma 'shuq, mamduh and ma 'bud.¹ While Lescot was primarily interested in the correlation between the ghazal's addressee and actual individuals, others, notably Gilbert Lazard, have discussed the problem in connection with the "symbolic meaning" of the ghazals. On the basis of the triad of potential addressees Lazard posited three "degrees" of Hafiz's...