SOURCE: Schimmel, Annemarie. “Poetical Expression.” In I Am Wind, You Are Fire: The Life and Work of Rumi, pp. 34-50. Boston and London: Shambhala, 1992.

In the following essay, Schimmel provides an introduction to the relationship between spiritual experience and poetic expression in Rumi's ghazals, Mathnawi and Divan.

Where am I, where is poetry? But that Turk breathes into me: Ho, who are you? 

(d 1949)

This couplet, with its citation in Turkish, expresses Maulana's attitude toward his own verse: he never fully understood how he had turned into a poet. The deprecative remark in Fīhi mā fīhi that he spouts verses for the sake of entertaining his friends, “as if someone were to put his hand into tripe to wash it because his guests want to eat tripe,” is certainly surprising, coming as it does from a man who wrote nearly forty thousand verses of lyrical poetry...