iii. COLLECTED WORKS OF A POET.

The word dīvān is widely used both in Arabic and Persian to designate the collected poems of a particular author, generally without his or her long poems (maṯnawīs). The Arabic philologists of the Abbasid period (many of them of Persian origin) assembled the works of the pre-Islamic Arab poets, which had until then survived only through oral transmission, into collections which they called dīvāns, evidently by analogy to the registers or archives in which financial documents were preserved. Then the literate Arabic poets of the Abbasid period often collected their own poems in a dīvān, but in some cases their dīvāns were put together by others after their death, evidently because they had no time to do so themselves; this is the case, for example, with Motanabbī.

Many of the surviving dīvāns of pre-Mongol Persian poets are known only from manuscripts copied in the last two or at most three centuries and evidently represent collections assembled by literati of the Safavid period such as Taqī Kāšī (e.g., the dīvāns of Farroḵī, Lāmeʿī, Manūčehrī, and ʿOnṣorī). In the absence of old manuscripts it is difficult to say whether the Safavid prototypes of these dīvāns were based on earlier, lost, copies, or whether they were assembled ad hoc from the stray poems quoted in anthologies. Other published dīvāns were put together by their 20th-century editors. On the other hand, some early dīvāns, such as those of Azraqī or Sanāʾī, survive in good 13th-century manuscripts. In any case, Persian dīvāns did certainly exist at a very early date. Thus Nāṣer-e Ḵosrow writes that in the year 438/1046 the poet Qaṭrān “came to me and brought the dīvān of Monjīk and the dīvān of Daqīqī” (now both lost) and the same author speaks in his poems of his own ‘two dīvāns’ in Arabic and Persian. Neẓāmī Ganjavī indicates that he collected his own dīvān before 584/1188 (very early in his career) and his contemporary Farīdal-Dīn ʿAṭṭār also assembled his own dīvān, as he tells us in the introductions to two of his other works (Moḵtār-nāma and Ḵosrow-nāma). On the other hand the dīvān of Ẓahīr Fāryābī was assembled after the author’s death by the poet Shams-al-Dīn Sojāsī, who wrote a preface to it in prose.

In the post-Mongol period it is commonplace for poets to publish their own dīvāns. Amīr Ḵosrow collected his own poems at various stages in his life in five different dīvāns, for each of which he composed a prose introduction. His example was followed in the three dīvāns of Jāmī. By contrast, Saʿdī’s shorter poems are not assembled in a dīvān but rather are contained, together with his longer poems and his prose writings in the ‘complete works’ (kollīyāt) put together after his death by ʿAlī b. Aḥmad b. Abī Bakr b. Bīsotūn.

In most manuscripts (and modern editions) the poems in a given dīvān are grouped by genre (usually with qaṣīdas first, then strophic poems, ḡazals, qeṭʿas, and robāʿīs last) and then within each section the poems are arranged alphabetically by the last letter. However, in early manuscripts the poems are generally not arranged alphabetically, and often not separated by genre either, but often grouped by subject, or by their dedicatee. Both alphabetical and non-alphabetical ordering can be observed in early copies of Arabic dīvāns as well; it is thus likely that both systems were used for Persian dīvāns from an early date.