The Importance of Mountains in Iranian Literature in the Course of Time and the Effect of Modernity on its Conceptualization

Mountain is the place of gods in mythical thoughts and it is a place for revelations and conversations of the God with the prophets in important religions. But mountain itself is of utmost importance in Iran plateau due to the geographical condition of this territory and the fact that mountain has been the source of water. In Avesta, the book of the Zoroastrianism, the term mountain has been repeatedly used respectfully and the holy Quran has often highlighted its importance . As it is mentioned in the statement of the problem section of this article, the existence of water resources have been the main and preliminary factor for the establishment of the majority of Iranian cities and villages on the hillsides and mountain slopes but there have been other important influential factors like the pleasant weather of the mountain, the defensive role of the mountain against the natural and human disasters and the existence of the livelihood capacities as well as an array of the other factors that heavily affected the formation of these residential places and the continuation of their construction in the mountain sides.These functions have intensified the importance of mountains in Iranian lives. However, the significance of mountain has declined in the course of time for various reasons, especially because of the advent of modernity and technology; which accordingly, the meaning of mountain which was once a vital element, has been changed. Considering the current issue, the aim of the present study was to investigate the importance of the mountain in the course of the time in Iranian literature using a qualitative method for studying the historical documents through historical investigations of those poetic samples of poets who had had a brilliant position in the construction of Iranian language and memory. Later on, changes in the poets’ approaches and attitudes toward mountain were explored. As it is mentioned in the statement of the problem section of the present study, considering the importance of modernity’s entry to the mental position of people, the extent of the modernity's effect on the meaning of the mountain in poetry was also under investigation. The results of the study indicate- that the semantic position of the mountain has been changed during the time in the poets’ minds, especially in blank poems that are stemmed from the modernity’s entry into Iran.The substantial approach adopted by the blank verse poets toward mountain is mostly objective.Moreover, the investigations are reflective of the idea that there is another factor influencing the changes in the meaning of the nature and mountain before the entry of modernity into the contemporary poetry that might be even more important than the modernity itself, which is the poets and intellectuals’ repugnance of the Qajar and the Safaviyya eras due to the decline of the power of cultural generation and inappropriate retrospectively of the spiritual thoughts.