Coleman Barks
Poet · Interpreter of Rumi
What might open when we listen beyond the words?
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Coleman Barks in conversation with Great Mystery
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Let the Beauty We Love Be What We Do
Coleman Barks spent much of his life listening for the mystery within the poetry of the 13th-century Sufi mystic Rumi. For him, Rumi’s poems are not simply words to be understood—they are invitations to experience something deeper.
Barks describes Rumi’s poetry as an opening of the heart and an exploration of union: the sense that we are immersed in an immense creative energy that is expressing itself through the galaxies, the natural world, and our own lives.
Yet this mystery cannot be reached through the mind alone. Barks speaks of another way of knowing—a deeper part of ourselves that senses something beyond grief and separation, something that knows we belong to a greater whole. “That’s the mystery,” he says, “that cannot be said.”
For Barks, longing itself can become a doorway. The ache for connection is not necessarily something to escape; it may be the very movement toward what we seek. In Rumi’s poetry, longing becomes a kind of return—a recognition that the desire for union is itself a form of connection.
And perhaps the invitation is ultimately very simple: wake up to the beauty that is already here. Rather than retreating into study or trying to understand everything, we can breathe, listen, make something, love something—and allow beauty to become the way we live.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
ABOUT
Coleman Barks (1937–2026) was an American poet, writer, and teacher whose life became inseparable from the poetry of the 13th-century Sufi mystic Jalaluddin Rumi.
A professor of English at the University of Georgia for many years, Barks first encountered Rumi through the translations of others. What began as an unexpected fascination became a lifelong calling. He began creating his own contemporary English versions of Rumi’s poems, seeking not simply to translate the words but to allow their spirit, humor, longing, and ecstatic energy to speak directly to a modern reader.
His books—including The Essential Rumi, The Book of Love, and The Soul of Rumi—helped bring Rumi’s poetry to an enormous English-speaking audience and played a major role in introducing his work to readers around the world. His devotion to Rumi’s poetry eventually carried his work far beyond the English-speaking world; the University of Tehran awarded him an honorary doctorate in recognition of his contribution to Rumi’s legacy.
Barks also wrote and taught his own poetry, but Rumi remained at the center of his creative life. He described the process not as standing outside the poems and explaining them, but as entering into a kind of conversation with them—a meeting in which poetry could become a doorway into mystery, love, longing, and the experience of belonging to something larger than ourselves.
Through his work, Coleman Barks helped make Rumi’s ancient voice feel startlingly alive in the present moment.