Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi
Named for Rumi's spiritual teacher Shams of Tabriz, this vast lyric collection of over 40,000 verses ranks among the most translated poetry in the world. Its subject is mystical love: the soul's longing for union with the divine, rendered in ecstatic ghazals and rubā'ī (quatrains) that have lost none of their heat across seven centuries. Rumi has been the bestselling poet in America for decades, which says something about American spiritual hunger.
Forty thousand verses of ecstatic longing arrive in essentially one register, and the ecstasy blurs after the hundredth ghazal. Popular English versions are paraphrases with the Islam removed, made by writers who read no Persian; what survives is sentiment, which is why he ends up on wedding programs. The actual Divan demands more patience than the greeting-card Rumi ever lets on.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
