SOURCE: Reynold A. Nicholson, in an introduction to Rumi: Poet and Mystic (1207-1275), George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1950, pp. 17-26.

In the following excerpt, redrafted by A. J. Arberry and published five years after Nicholson's death, Nicholson discusses the pantheistic themes found in Rumi's Mathnavi and praises the poem's "exhilarating sense of largeness and freedom by its disregard for logical cohesion, defiance of conventions, bold use of the language of common life, and abundance of images drawn from homely things and incidents familiar to every one."

Rumi's literary output, as stupendous in magnitude as it is sublime in content, consists of the very large collection of mystical odes, perhaps as many as 2,500, which make up the Diwan-i Shams-i Tabrizi; the Mathnawi in six books of about 25,000 rhyming couplets; and the Ruba'iyat or quatrains, of which maybe about 1,600 are authentic.¹ The forms in which he clothes his religious philosophy...