(June 24, 2019 at 8:35 pm)chimp3 Wrote: Rumi was apoet. It was not an Islamic quote although Sufis consider Rumi a founder.
This is good to keep in mind, I think.
Until very recently, we can't really divide poets from religious people. Even poems that don't seem explicitly religious are likely to be rooted in the writer's thoughts about subjects that were thought about within a religious structure -- love, morality, the individual's relation to the natural world, and everything else, just about.
Dante's stilo nuovo poems are about pretty girls. They are also inseparable from his religious views.
I think it's important for us not to pretend that everything prior to, say, The Origin of Species, is rendered irrelevant because it is religious.
