Why is Rumi the best-selling poet in the US?

Just now,” Coleman Barks says, “I feel there is a strong global movement, an impulse that wants to dissolve the boundaries that religions have put up and end the sectarian violence. It is said that people of all religions came to Rumi's funeral in 1273. Because, they said, he deepens our faith wherever we are. This is a powerful element in his appeal now.”

Rumi was an experimental innovator among the Persian poets and he was a Sufi master,” says Jawid Mojaddedi, a scholar of early and medieval Sufism at Rutgers University and an award-winning Rumi translator. “This combination of mystical richness and bold adaptations of poetic forms is the key to his popularity today.” The first of Rumi’s four main innovations is his direct address to readers in the rare second person, says Mojaddedi. “I think contemporary readers respond well to this directness.” Second is his urge to teach: “Readers of ‘inspirational’ literature are drawn to Rumi’s poetry.” Third, “his use of everyday imagery.” And fourth, “his optimism of the attainment of union within his lyrical love ghazals. The convention in that form is to stress its unattainability and the cruel rebuffs of the beloved. Rumi celebrates union.”

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