Mohammad-Taqi Bahar

Mirza Mohammad-Taqi Bahar was born in Mashhad and inherited the hereditary title Malek o-Sho'ara (Poet Laureate) from his father at age eighteen. Joining the revolutionary constitutionalist movement in 1906, he founded the militant reformist newspapers Nowbahar and Iran-e Now, facing assassination attempts and repeated imprisonment for defending parliamentary democracy.

Elected six times to parliament, Bahar was simultaneously Iran's supreme neoclassical poet and preeminent academic scholar. His monumental three-volume Sabk-Shenasi (Stylistics) established the academic history of Persian prose styles, while his stirring patriotic odes, including 'Damavandiyya' and the hymn 'Morghe Sahar' (Bird of Dawn), immortalized him as the national voice of Iranian constitutional liberty.