World Poetry Day: Passion, migration, and spiritual geography in the Urdu poet Iftikhar Arif’s poems

Poetry is inseparable from passion. In every act of creativity, passion functions not merely as a catalyst but as the very substratum that sustains the imaginative universe of the poet. The poet, in this sense, is the one who internalises the world’s anxieties, hopes, alienations, and possibilities.

Passion becomes the treasure of the heart, and those who respond to the existential pathos of human life find their hearts beating to deeper emotional and spiritual impulses. The poet thus participates in a universal quest for beauty, truth, justice, and transcendence. It is perhaps in this sense that Jalaluddin Rumi once described sages as “spies of the divine,” diving into the secrets of the universe and becoming intimate with its hidden workings. Such a description aptly characterises the poetic universe of the Urdu poet Iftikhar Arif. His poetry emerges from an intense engagement with life and its complexities. It is not confined to technical virtuosity or rhetorical elegance; rather, it is an existential dialogue with history, culture, displacement, memory, and spirituality. Arif belongs to a rare class of poets who transform personal experience into universal poetic insight.

Autobiographical experience and universal narration

The role of the poet has often been interpreted as the ability to perceive “the...

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