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Abstract

Mythological worlds share a lot in common and portray a universe quite dissimilar to that of reality. This has encouraged writers worldwide to search for possible shared grounds. This article focuses on the bird as a recurring motif among the nineteenth-century French and classic Persian poets. The writer argues that the bird has had symbolic, aesthetic, expressive and archetypal representations both in French and Persian poetry. She further illustrates that these representations range from distanced but identifiable descriptions of birds to representations of humankind's desire to encompass the world, to transcend it or even go to an extreme of orgiastic divesting of the human shape in order to become a bird.

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