One day in 1976, the poet Robert Bly handed his close friend Coleman Barks an old translation of several works by Rumi, the 13th-century Persian writer, encouraging him to render them in modern free verse.
“Release the poems from their cages,” Mr. Bly said.
Mr. Barks, though a poet himself, was an unlikely choice for this task: Tennessee born and bred, he did not know a word of Persian. He taught English at the University of Georgia and had begun to build a reputation as a Southern writer in the vein of James Dickey and Charles Wright.
He set Rumi aside.
But a year later, he had a dream. In it, a man sat cross-legged on a cliff, surrounded by a warm light. Not long after, Mr. Barks said, he met that same man — a Sufi mystic named Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen — at a gathering in Philadelphia.
Mr. Barks took the encounter as a sign.
Over the subsequent decades, he produced more than a dozen books of Rumi’s poetry, taking older Persian-English translations and reworking the language and meaning for a modern readership.
Thanks in large part to Mr. Barks, who died on Feb. 23 at 88, Rumi is now one of the best-selling poets in America, some 750 years after his death. Mr. Barks’s renditions of his poems, in books like “The Essential Rumi” (1995), have sold more than a million copies.
Quotes from Barks-as-Rumi appear on Valentine’s Day cards, throw pillows and inspirational posters. In 2015, the band Coldplay included a clip of Mr. Barks reading Rumi’s poem “The Guest House” on the song “Kaleidoscope,” off its album “A Head Full of Dreams.”
Not everyone was enamored of Mr. Barks’s work. Some scholars of Islamic literature said he played too loosely with Rumi’s texts, excising references to Islam and the Quran and passing off a religious poet as more secular and humanistic than he really was.
“What we in the Muslim world call ‘The Persian Quran,’ Barks began to rephrase into pop-Sufism for dummies,” the critic Zirrar Ali wrote on his website in 2020.
Mr. Barks conceded that his version of Rumi was not entirely faithful to the original. But his goal, he said, was to extract a certain sensibility from the poems that he hoped would resonate with readers — even if it didn’t communicate the full force of the work.
“The attunement to Rumi isn’t as deep as I’d like, but maybe it’s a way of introducing Rumi to a wider audience, so it’s good and bad,” he told The Guardian in 2001. “Maybe some 17-year-old in the Midwest will latch on to it, and his life will be changed.”
Coleman Bryan Barks was born on April 23, 1937, in Chattanooga, Tenn. His father, Herbert, was the headmaster of Baylor School, a private college-preparatory institution, and his mother, Elizabeth (Bryan) Barks, oversaw the home.
Coleman grew up on the school’s leafy campus, perched along the Tennessee River as it cut through the southern reaches of the Appalachian Mountains — a landscape that shaped the poetry he would write.
He received a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of North Carolina in 1959 and a master’s in the same subject from the University of California, Berkeley in 1961. He returned to U.N.C. for his doctorate, also in English, which he completed in 1968.
The year before, he had joined the faculty at the University of Georgia after teaching for two years at the University of California, Los Angeles.
He married Kittsu Greenwood in 1962. They later divorced.
His son Ben said Mr. Barks died at his home in Athens, Ga. He is also survived by another son, Cole; six grandchildren; his brother, Herbert; his sister, Elizabeth Barks Cox, also a writer; and his longtime companion, Lisa Starr.
Mr. Barks published several books of his own poetry, starting with “The Juice” in 1972. In a review, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution raved about his writing, saying it “startled through playfulness and leaps of the imagination.”
He became an adept interpreter of Rumi onstage as well as in print. He would often speak with a musical accompaniment, the way Rumi was said to have done.
Mr. Barks retired from teaching in 1997 to focus on what he called his “re-renderings” of Rumi. He ran Maypop Books, a small publishing company in Athens that produced his books, and he became a fixture at literary festivals around the country.
Rumi — and Mr. Barks, as his interpreter — got a big boost after Sept. 11, 2001, when both Muslim and non-Muslim audiences saw his writing as an antidote to the Islamic extremism that drove the attacks on the World Trade Center
In 2005, the State Department sent Mr. Barks on a good-will tour of Afghanistan, where Rumi was born. In 2006, he received an honorary degree from the University of Tehran.
Rumi’s “branch of Islam, the Sufism part, is the cure for Talibanism,” Mr. Barks told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2001. “It’s the exact opposite of fundamental zealousness. It’s the part that dances in the streets and embraces everyone. Its followers live in the moment.”
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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