Despite his profound effect on Persian life and culture and his enduring popularity and influence, few details of his life are known, and particularly about his early life there is a great deal of more or less mythical anecdote. Some of the early tazkeras (biographical sketches) mentioning Hafez are generally considered unreliable. One early document discussing Hafez' life is the preface of his Div?n, which was written by an unknown contemporary of Hafez whose name may have been Mo?ammad Goland?m. Two of the most highly regarded modern editions of Hafez's Div?n are compiled by Mo?ammad Qazvini and Q?sem ?ani (495 ghazals) and by Parviz Natil Khanlari (486 ghazals).

Modern scholars generally agree that Hafez was born either in 1315 or 1317, and following an account by Jami, consider 1390 as the year in which he died. Supported by patronage from the area’s rulers, from Shah Abu Ishaq, who came to power while Hafez was in his teens, until the rule of Timur Lang (Tamerlane) at the end of his life, he even managed to write under the strictly orthodox Muslim and tyrannical ruler Shah Mubariz ud-Din Muhammad (Mubariz Muzaffar), though his work flourished most under the twenty-seven year reign of Jalal ud-Din Shah Shuja (Shah Shuja). Although no historical evidence of this is available, one source claims that H?fez briefly fell out of favor with Shah Shuja for mocking inferior poets (Shah Shuja wrote poetry himself and may have taken the comments personally), forcing H?fez to flee from Shiraz to Isfahan and Yazd. His mausoleum, H?fezieh, is located in the Musalla Gardens of Shiraz

Many semi-miraculous mythical tales were woven around H?fez after his death.

• It is said that, by listening to his father's recitations, H?fez had accomplished the task of learning the Qur'an by heart, at an early age (that is in fact the meaning of the word Hafez). At the same time H?fez is said to have known by heart, the works of Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, Saadi, Farid ud-Din and Nezami.

• According to one tradition, before meeting Hajji Zayn al-Attar, H?fez had been working in a local bakery. H?fez delivered bread to a wealthy quarter of the town where he saw Shakh-e Nabat, allegedly a woman of great beauty, to whom some of his poems are addressed. In the knowledge that his love for her would not be requited and ravished by her beauty, he allegedly had his first mystic vigil in his desire to realize this union, whereupon, overcome by a being of a surpassing beauty (who identifies himself as an angel), he begins his mystic path of realization, in pursuit of spiritual union with the divine. The obvious Western parallel is that of Dante and Beatrice.

• At age 60 he is said to have begun a Chilla-nashini, a 40-day-and-night vigil by sitting in a circle which he had drawn for himself. On the 40th day, he once again met with Zayn al-Attar on what is known to be their fortieth anniversary and was offered a cup of wine. It was there where he is said to have attained "Cosmic Consciousness". H?fez hints at this episode in one of his verses where he advises the reader to attain "clarity of wine" by letting it "sit for 40 days".

• In one famous tale, the famed conqueror Tamerlane angrily summoned H?fez to him to give him an explanation for one of his verses

??? ?? ??? ?????? ???????? ?? ????

?? ??? ?????? ???? ?????? ? ????? ??

If that Shirazi Turk would take my heart in hand

I would remit Samarkand and Bukh?r? for his/her Hindu mole

With Samarkand being Timur's capital and Bokhara his kingdom's finest city. "With the blows of my lustrous sword," Timur complained, "I have subjugated most of the habitable globe... to embellish Samarkand and Bokhara, the seats of my government; and you, would sell them for the black mole of some boy in Shiraz!" H?fez, so the tale goes, bowed deeply and replied "Alas, O Prince, it is this prodigality which is the cause of the misery in which you find me".

So surprised and pleased was Timur with this response that he dismissed Hafez with handsome gifts.

Hafez was well acclaimed throughout the Islamic world during his lifetime, with other Persian poets imitating his work, and offers of patronage from Baghdad and India. Today, he is the most popular poet in Iran; even libraries without the Qur’an contain his Diwan.

Much later, the work of H?fez would leave a mark on such Western writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Goethe. His work was first translated into English in 1771 by William Jones.

Most recently, The Gift: Poems by Hafiz the Great Sufi Master, a collection of poems by Daniel Ladinsky (1999) has been both commercially successful and a source of controversy. Ladinsky claims to speak Persian, though not fluently. In the introduction to the book, he states his work is a "unique portrait is derived from the study of thousands of pages of poems and text attributed to this fourteenth-century master [...] working with hundred-year-old English renderings and translations". The texts he purports to have used include H. Wilberforce Clark's 1891 rendering. He said that he found the Persian originals "remarkably demanding" to translate. Critics such as Murat Nemet-Nejat, a poet, essayist and translator of modern Turkish poetry, have asserted that his translations are in fact Ladinsky's own inventions. The fact that Ladinsky's poems are not a literal representation of Hafez' work was a source of embarrassment for Dalton McGuinty, the Premier of Ontario, when it was discovered that the poem McGuinty had recited from Ladinsky's book at a Nowruz celebration in Toronto in 2009 had no corresponding Persian original. Parvin Loloi has said of Ladinsky's work that "it is hard to see that it has done much for the memory of the Persian poet."

There is no definitive version of his collected works (or D?v?n); editions vary from 573 to 994 poems. In Iran, his collected works have come to be used as an aid to popular divination. 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 remove errors introduced by later copyists and censors. However, the reliability of such work has been questioned, and in the words of H?fez scholar Iraj Bashiri.... "there remains little hope from there (i.e.: Iran) for an authenticated diwan".

Though H?fez’s poetry is influenced by Islam, he is widely respected by Hindus, Christians and others. The Indian sage of Iranian descent Meher Baba, who syncretized elements of Sufism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and Christian mysticism, recited H?fez's poetry until his dying day. October 12 is celebrated as Hafez Day in Iran.

The question of whether his work is to be interpreted literally, mystically or both, has been a source of concern and contention to western scholars. On the one hand, some of his early readers such as William Jones saw in him a conventional lyricist similar to European love poets such as Petrarch. Others such as Wilberforce Clarke saw him as purely a poet of didactic, ecstatic mysticism in the manner of Rumi, a view which modern scholarship has come to reject . This confusion stems from the fact that, early in Persian literary history, the poetic vocabulary was usurped by mystics who believed that the ineffable could be better expressed in poetry than in prose. In composing poems of mystic content, they imbued every word and image with mystical undertones, thereby causing mysticism and lyricism to essentially converge into a single tradition. As a result, no fourteenth century Persian poet could write a lyrical poem without having a flavor of mysticism forced on it by the poetic vocabulary itself.. While some poets, such as Ubayd Zakani, attempted to distance themselves from this fused mystical-lyrical tradition by writing satires, Hafiz embraced the fusion and thrived on it. W.M. Thackston has said of this that Hafiz "sang a rare blend of human and mystic love so balanced...that it is impossible to separate one from the other."

For this reason among others, the history of the translation of H?fez has been a complicated one, and few translations into western languages have been wholly successful.

One of the figurative gestures for which he is most famous (and which is among the most difficult to translate) is ?h?m or artful punning. Thus a word such as gowhar which could mean both "essence, truth" and "pearl" would take on both meanings at once as in a phrase such as "a pearl/essential truth which was outside the shell of superficial existence".

Hafez often took advantage of the aforementioned lack of distinction between lyrical, mystical and panegyric writing by using highly intellectualized, elaborate metaphors and images so as to suggest multiple possible meanings. This may be illustrated via a couplet from the beginning of one of Hafez' poems.

The cypress tree is a symbol both of the beloved and of a regal presence. The nightingale and birdsong evoke the traditional setting for human love. The "lessons of spiritual stations" suggest, obviously, a mystical undertone as well. (Though the word for "spiritual" could also be translated as "intrinsically meaningful.") Therefore, the words could signify at once a prince addressing his devoted followers, a lover courting a beloved and the reception of spiritual wisdom.

Twenty years after his death, a tomb (the Hafezieh) was erected to honor Hafez in the Musalla Gardens in Shiraz. The current Mausolem was designed by André Godard, French archeologist and architect, in the late 1930s. Inside, Hafez's alabaster tombstone bore one of his poems inscribed upon it.