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Customer Review
Reviewed in the United States on December 26, 2016
Rumi's poetry is one long love song to the divine. Frequently, whole poems didn't resonate with me except in their general ecstasy and enthusiasm for life, but I often found individual lines astonishing me with timeless, nourishing, life-affirming wisdom.
The work is nearly 800 years old, yet much of the psychological insight and social commentary feels more relevant than ever now, making it a genuine classic of world literature. Rumi comments on a civilization ambushed by fools. He echoes Nietzsche, Eliot, and Yeats, when discussing the emptiness of existence without a spiritual center. He forecasts the collapse of modernism by pointing out the sterile, reductive flaws of a materialistic worldview. Unlike the morbidity of an Ecclesiastes, Aurelius, or Pascal who are often cynical, stoic, or melancholy in their assessment of the human condition, Rumi never wavers in his joyful participation in the infinite dance of the cosmos. The only comparable literary figure in the West who comes to mind is Walt Whitman.
It's a privilege and a pleasure to sit at the feet of this ancient Sufi master, to drink from his inexhaustible fountain of praise, love, wisdom, to be illuminated by his intoxicating spirit songs.
The work is nearly 800 years old, yet much of the psychological insight and social commentary feels more relevant than ever now, making it a genuine classic of world literature. Rumi comments on a civilization ambushed by fools. He echoes Nietzsche, Eliot, and Yeats, when discussing the emptiness of existence without a spiritual center. He forecasts the collapse of modernism by pointing out the sterile, reductive flaws of a materialistic worldview. Unlike the morbidity of an Ecclesiastes, Aurelius, or Pascal who are often cynical, stoic, or melancholy in their assessment of the human condition, Rumi never wavers in his joyful participation in the infinite dance of the cosmos. The only comparable literary figure in the West who comes to mind is Walt Whitman.
It's a privilege and a pleasure to sit at the feet of this ancient Sufi master, to drink from his inexhaustible fountain of praise, love, wisdom, to be illuminated by his intoxicating spirit songs.
