We are familiar with this picture that seems to come from another continent: the poet, exiled from Kallipolis, threadbare, smelly, homeless, an insomniac, living with no schedule, and producing things whose function is unclear: poems. He rarely finds place within a structure. He is outside. Even if he wanted to return, Kallipolis would not take him back. Within the ideal city of Plato's imagination, the poet is an element whose function is only to praise the herowhich we know does not work because heroes are figures who freeze in obligatory odes. So there is some truth, albeit slightly exaggerated, in Alfred de Vigny's words of 1832, that poets are "the race always cursed by the powerful of the earth."

'The builder of Batavia' who is buried there was a man with a motto, as quoted in 1618: "Despair not, spare your enemies not, for God is with us."

Attar lived in a time of slim hope, and died aged 76 in a massacre. He lived in Nishapur, in the province of Khorasan in Persia where he was born around 1145, and was relatively well off. Before he wrote poetry using the name Attar and travelled widely meeting prominent Sufis, he lived comfortably as a pharmacist. Patients thronged to him. From them, Attar earned his living-and from them, too, he got to know sad stories of people and the fragility of faith in life.