It has often been written by Western scholars studying Persian literature that the Persians (Iranians) quote Hafiz more frequently than Westerners quote Shakespeare. Many scholars in both the East and the West consider him the greatest lyric poet of all time.

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Because Persians in his time and for several centuries thereafter had little inclination to record or study the lives of their writers, little is known about the life of Hafiz, although he was popular in his own day. He was born Shams al-Din Muhammad Hafiz in the town of Shiraz some time between 1320 and 1326. His father died when he was a child.

Hafiz apparently married and fathered a son. Most, but not all, scholars believe he was a Sufi. Whatever his religious beliefs, he was at one time banished from Shiraz at the request of religious leaders because his ghazals were viewed as having a negative influence on society.

There is no definitive version of Hafiz's Divan; various "complete" editions range from 573 to 994 poems. Nevertheless, despite the problems with authenticating his biography and other works, Hafiz's contribution to literature has been immeasurable. Goethe, Emerson, Edward Carpenter, and Gide all fell under his spell; Goethe seems to have been particularly inspired. Hafiz is sometimes called "the master of the erotic ghazal," and much of the sexuality in his work is .

His ghazals are infused with a homosexual mysticism that startles many Western minds because of the expression of male-male love as not merely approaching but actually reaching a state of divinity. Hafiz believed one can see an image of God in the face of one's beloved. His religious fervor is matched by his intense carnal desires, but he sees no contradiction in the two: "The higher life lusted for the dimple in your chin," he says in one poem.

Perhaps the most quoted couplet in all his ghazals are the lines "If that Tartar, that fair-skinned Turk of Shiraz, gets hold of my heart / I'll give Bokhara and Samarkand for the Indian-black mole on his cheek." They exhibit a playfulness typical of many of his ghazals, and this style has won him many admirers. But it is his most serious ghazals that have put him in the rare company of Shakespeare as one of the greatest lyric poets the world has ever seen.

For gay readers, even the most cursory glance at a good translation of his work (be warned that some translators change the pronouns to make it appear that all the objects of his affection are female) is rewarding beyond expression. "With looks disheveled, flushed in a sweat of drunkenness / His shirt torn open, a song on his lips and wine cup in his hand / With eyes looking for trouble, lips softly complaining / So at midnight last night he came and sat at my pillow. . . ."

Erotic and pornographic works have been written in many cultures since ancient times and recently have flourished with the relaxation of censorship.

Over a period of two millennia, sodomy has been by turns condemned and celebrated in Persian literature.

The gay tradition in literature from ancient times to the present is primarily a tradition not of prose but of verse.

Edward Carpenter, a champion of both women's and homosexuals' liberation, was one of the great socialist visionaries of England at the turn of the twentieth century.

André Gide, one of the premier French writers of the twentieth century, reflected his homosexuality in many of his numerous works.

As one of the key figures that western civilization has used to define itself, William Shakespeare stands in a complicated, fiercely contested relationship to homosexuality.