Among the poets who continued their experiments towards a radical modernization of Persian poetry, it was Nima Yushij (1896-1959) who took revolutionary measures to establish a new perspective in Persian poetry. He began writing poetry when he was a high school student, and the person who encouraged him by reading his poems and helping him to improve his versification, was one of his teachers, Nezam Vafa (1883-1960), himself a lyric poet who wrote simple love poems in the classical style, mingled with pieces of romantic poetical prose. 

Until the age of twelve Nima Yushij had lived in Yush, a village in the northern province of Mazandaran, near the Caspian Sea, where his father was a farmer. In his speech to the First Congress of Iranian Writers, 1946, in Tehran, Nima Yushij said: "My first years of life were spent among the shepherds and horse-herders who, in their seasonal movements from one grassland to another, every evening sat round the fire on the Mountainside for long hours. From my childhood years I remember nothing but savage fights, and other things related to a nomadic life, and the simple amusements of those people in an atmosphere of monotony and ignorance. I learned reading and writing from a preacher and teacher of the village where I was born. He used to run after me through the alleyways and, catching me, tied my thin feet to rough, thorny trees and beat me with long canes. He had made a scroll by pasting together some letters which peasants had written to their relatives, and he ordered me to learn the whole scroll by heart."

His mother, mild in nature, born and bred in a family of good education and learning, knew by heart many classical stories, such as Nezami's "Haft Peykar" (The Seven Beauties), and many poems, specially Hafez's ghazals, which she related and recited to him. This was how Nima became so fascinated with Nezami and Hafez and remained an ardent admirer of their work, all his life. In the long years of experimenting with different forms of classical poetry, he tried to imitate Nezami by writing a dramatic long poem, about 1500 couplets, and the result is "Ghal'e-ye Seghrim" (Seghrim Fortress), displaying all the shortcoming of a novice in composition and versification.

His attempts in imitating Abd-dor-Rahman Jami (1414-1492) and Jalal-od-Din Rumi in writing didactic anecdotes in verse, and Omar Khayyam in composing ruba'is (quatrains), did not go beyond the level of crude exercises. 

Nima Yushij continued these experiments until 1937, when he wrote his first symbolist free verse, "The Phoenix", in which he successfully employed what he had learned from some of the French symbolists. Until then his dependence on classical forms had not allowed him to enter a completely new realm of poetry. 

What made Nima Yushij a great, powerful guru for the young poets of his time were his innovations in form and style rather than the content of his poetry. He came to the scene of change at a time when all the conservative efforts of the Neo-classicists, Revivalists and others had failed to free Persian poetry from the long decadence which was, to a great extent, the result of the ruling power of prosody over subject matter. The quantitative meters in Persian verse are numerous and they have equal possibilities for being broken and used in making lines of different lengths in a poem; but classical forms did not allow this. The other great obstacle to any innovation in the rhythmic construction of poems, was the fixed pattern of rhymes in different forms. 

Moreover, the unit for sentences in verse was the "beyt", two equal lines rhymed as their forms permitted. Therefore, a complete thought, the content of a sentence, had to be expressed in the confines of one beyt. In other words, the beyt was the actual stanza in any form of poetry. It was only free verse that could break all these fetters of Persian prosody, and it was Nima Yushij accomplished this revolutionary work. 

Using all these possibilities resulted not only in freedom in form, but also gave a new perspective to Persian poetry. Now a poem, for instance a ghazal, was not to be composed of a number of unrelated, or rather incoherent, thoughts or ideas, connected together by the fixed pattern of rhymes in the equal lines of a certain form. In Nima-esque modern prosody, the subject of a poem attained its right continuity and integrity, as well as the coherence it needed for its parts. Thus one poem, as its subject required, could be completed in only a few lines, and another in pages of lines and paragraphs of different lengths.

In this way Persian Poetry, while maintaining its own independence, gained after a thousand years the unbounded freedom of prose. 

(Source: The Art Arena)