Why is Parvīn Iᶜtiṣāmī Still Popular?

Despite controversies around Parvīn's authorship as a woman poet, her poetry has continued to retain immense popularity with her audience. The first edition of her Dīvān, published in 1935, consisted of one-hundred and fifty-eight poems. Dabashi informs us that Parvīn's Dīvān was issued in 1000 copies in the first printing, which was a relatively high number for that time. Several months after she died, the second edition of her Dīvān, enlarged by fifty-three poems, was published in 1941. Parvīn's posthumous publications met with remarkable success. 20000 copies were published in the eighth reprint of Parvīn's Dīvān in 1984, which was a considerable number. According to Farzaneh Milani, since Parvīn has had a consistent, ‘powerful hold on the imagination of her amazingly large readership’, her Dīvān has gone through numerous editions to date. Shafīᶜī-Kadkanī praises Parvīn for her literary success by comparing her with prominent poets. Regarding popularity with audiences, and the variety of modes of poetic expression, Shafīᶜī-Kadkanī posits that the only contemporary poet comparable to Parvīn was the eminent poet Bahār. He observes that there are merely a small number of prominent mediaeval poets such as Firdowsī (d. 1019 or 1025), Khayyām (d. 1131), Niẓāmī (d. 1209), Rūmī (d. 1273), Saᶜdī (d. 1291), and Ḥāfiẓ (d. 1390) in the history of Persian literature who have enjoyed the same ‘yearly, monthly or even daily’ increase in popularity with their readership as Parvīn. In his opinion, Parvīn's growing popularity was the ‘miracle’ of this young daughter born to the family of Persian literary tradition.