The Ontology of the In-text Addressee in New Wave Poetry

New Wave poetry emerged as one of the trends in contemporary Persian poetry in the intellectual atmosphere of the 1960’s. It was influenced by modernism and existentialism; therefore, it can be classified as self-reflective and subjective. In a world where ‘I’ is placed at the center, events and its surroundings, and even the ‘self’ are being identified based on subjectivity. Such identification is manifested merely through an exterior and dialogic interaction with an ‘other’ who the poet addresses as ‘you’. An in-depth ontological analysis of this ‘you’ in New Wave poetry indicates that the signifying and referential scope of ‘you’ as a pronoun is self-referential in most cases, despite its manifestations. In other words, ‘you’ has a superficial reference which constructs a narrative identity. This enables the poet to provide better and more precise conditions to understand his/her personal identity within an interior and exterior back and forth movement. However, the signifying scope of ‘you’ has been expanded to the ‘other’ as an exterior and independent being to complement and make the ‘self’ and its surrounding world impersonal. Therefore, addressing ‘you’ as the ‘self’, ‘sameness’ and ‘other’ has a cognitive nature, and when the poet begins to look beyond himself/herself, concepts such as justice, freedom and humanity appear in the poems and ‘you’ also signifies politically and socially.
 

Extended Abstract
 
1. Introduction
The New Wave poets claim to have created a new capacity in modern Persian poetry. Influenced by European modernism and the intellectual atmosphere of the 1960s in Iran, New Wave poetry is open to ontological interpretations. In the majority of these poems, the poet addresses a ‘you’ that lacks any distinctive identity. In the present article, the ontological status of ‘you’, addressed by the poet/speaker in New Wave poems by poets such as Ahmadreza Ahmadi, Bijan Elahi, Hossein Rasael, Parviz Eslampour and Mahmoud Shoja’ee, among others, will be studied.
 
2. Theoretical Framework
The ideas of existentialist philosophers such as Sartre and thinkers such as Levinas and Ricoeur form the theoretical framework of the present article. Levinas’ ideas concerning understanding the ‘other’ and its relation with ‘I’ as well as Ricoeur’s ideas about the cognitive aspects of  the ‘self’ are the focus of attention in this study.
 
3. Methodology
Adopting a descriptive-analytic approach, this article explores all the poetry collections by the most representative New Wave poets (eleven pots) to identify all instances of the poets’ use of the second person pronoun ‘you’. This ‘you’ has been studied based on textual signification, utterances and verbs of motion and cognition so as to show the relations between ‘you’, ‘I’, the self and the other through the interpretation of cognitive and functional statements.
 
4. Findings
The findings of the present study indicate that New Wave poetry is mostly about ‘self’. In this poetry ‘you’ constructs a kind of narrative identity and enables the poet to achieve a better understanding by moving from the ‘self’ to an entity beyond ‘self’.
 5. Conclusion
In New Wave poetry the poets use the pronoun ‘you’ even when trying to express their inner feelings and concerns. This might be interpreted as an inclination on the part of the poets toward communication and dialogue with the outside world. However, this kind of poetry is introverted and existential and has a cognitive nature. In this poetry the poets are usually addressing themselves, and when the ‘other’ is allowed to enter their solitude it is mostly to make the ‘self’ better understood. In rare cases when the poet moves beyond the ‘self’, they mostly deal with concepts of freedom, justice and humanity in their poetry and ‘you’ has a social and political significance.