1937–2026 · American poet · the man who made Rumi a bestseller in English
Coleman Barks taught literature at the University of Georgia for three decades and, from 1976 — when the poet Robert Bly handed him a sheaf of academic translations — spent the rest of his life remaking Rumi in American free verse. He neither spoke nor read Persian, working instead from other people’s literal renderings, and he consistently called the results versions rather than translations. Those versions sold in the hundreds of thousands and made a 13th-century Persian jurist the best-selling poet in the United States — which is precisely why so many sentences of Barks’ own composition now circulate under Rumi’s name.