Mohammad-Taqi Bahar
Mohammad-Taqi Bahar was a poet, scholar and politician from Mashhad, born in 1886, who was given the title Malek osh-Sho'ara, king of poets, by the Qajar court at nineteen and gave the title up to join the Constitutional Revolution, publishing newspapers for parliamentary rule. Reza Shah had him jailed and then exiled to Isfahan; he came back to teach Persian literature at the new University of Tehran and served briefly as minister of culture in 1945. He died in Tehran in April 1951.
The newspapers were Khorasan, Now-Bahar and Tazeh-Bahar, and the poems that travelled furthest were the political ones: Damavand, the white chained beast of 1922, and the words of Morghe Sahar, set by Morteza Neydavoud in 1927 and banned by the censors within a year. He is buried at Zahir od-Dowleh, the cemetery of artists on the slope above Tehran.