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Intellectual and artistic legacy

Hafez was acclaimed throughout the Islamic world during his lifetime, with other Persian poets imitating his work, and offers of patronage from Baghdad to India.

His work was first translated into English in 1771 by William Jones. It would leave a mark on such Western writers as Thoreau, Goethe, W. B. Yeats, in his prose anthology book of essays, Discoveries, as well as gaining a positive reception within West Bengal, in India, among some of the most prolific religious leaders and poets in this province, Debendranath Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore 's father, who knew Persian and used to recite from Hafez's Divans and in this line, Gurudev himself, who, during his visit to Persia in 1932, also made a homage visit to Hafez's tomb in Shiraz and Ralph Waldo Emerson (the last referred to him as "a poet's poet"). Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has his character Sherlock Holmes state that "there is as much sense in Hafiz as in Horace, and as much knowledge of the world" (in A Case of Identity). Friedrich Engels mentioned him in an 1853 letter to Karl Marx.

There is no definitive version of his collected works (or Dīvān); editions vary from 573 to 994 poems. Only since the 1940s has a sustained scholarly attempt (by Mas'ud Farzad, Qasim Ghani and others in Iran) been made to authenticate his work and to remove errors introduced by later copyists and censors. However, the reliability of such work has been questioned, and in the words of Hāfez scholar Iraj Bashiri, "there remains little hope from there (i.e., Iran) for an authenticated diwan".