Shams al-Din Mohammad Vahshi Bafghi is one of the poets of the second half of the 10th century AH. He was born in 939 AH, in the village of Bafgh in Yazd Province. The house where he was born still remains in this city. After learning the basics of literature, he went to Yazd and then, Kashan. He directed a Maktab (a type of tradition school for elementary education) for some time, and then returned to Yazd and stayed there until his death.
Vahshi Bafghi spent the best years of his career as a poet in Yazd and earned his income by praising the grandees of Yazd and Kerman. He witnessed the rule of two Safavid kings, Shah Tahmasp I and Shah Ismail I. Vahshi Bafghi has written a poem praising Tahmasp I. Being a romantic, his poems were inspired, in style, by a poet from Shiraz named Baba Feghani. Baba Feghani founded the Hindi or Voghu’ school of poetry. Vahshi Bafghi enhanced the satirical aspect of the Voghu’ school to exaggerated extents. He created a new style of poem called Vasukht or Vasugh, which is almost the same as his own name. In Farsi literature, Vasukht is a type of poem, of which the main theme is the rejection of one’s love subject. It describes the lover’s reaction to this disloyalty and one-sided affection.
By creating the Vasukht school, Vahshi Bafghi shone like a star in the sky of Iran literature. With a wistful heart, he added simplicity, and fluent to the Farsi poems and became a prominent poet by doing so. Some know him as the Fallen Nezami, the greatest romantic epic poet in Persian literature. Others describe him as Adib-e Dabestane Asheghi (a man of words in the school of love). He has many works written in the form of couplets, Ghazals, ruba’i and other forms of Faris poems. His most important work is Shirin o Farhad written in the form of couplets. It remained unfinished due to the sudden death of the poet. He passed away in 991 AH, when he was fifty two. He is buried in Yazd.