The poetry of resistance is founded upon idealism, truth‑seeking, and symbolic protest. Despite the political pressure and social repression that dominated the atmosphere of the 1960s, Shafi‘i Kadkani, used metaphorical language and indirect expression and transformed poetry into a means of resistance, enlightenment, and safeguarding society. This study aims to analyze the ideals, symbols, and semantic mechanisms of resistance in selected prominent poems of Shafi‘i, exploring the representation of ideals during the 1960s and the discourse of resistance at both semantic and linguistic levels. Applying the perspectives of ideological criticism and critical discourse analysis, particularly based on van Dijk’s approach, it examines the semantic and discursive tools of resistance in Shafi‘i’s poetry. The findings reveal that Shafi‘i’s poetry is an intellectual and cautious response to the political and social conditions of that decade; using condensed language, extensive symbolism, defamiliarization, and the use of nature and tradition, creates an effective discourse against the political and monarchical hegemony of its time. The pursuit of ideals such as awareness, freedom, justice, and the eradication of tyranny and colonialism forms the core of this discourse. Without direct confrontation, Shafi‘i uses metaphor and symbolic thinking to turn poetry into an intellectual weapon, conveying the individual and collective experiences of Iranian society through a novel yet deeply rooted expression. This analysis shows that the resistance poetry of the 1960s in Shafi‘i’s works reflects a conflict between the discourse of domination and awareness, which strengthened the foundations of committed poetry in modern Persian literature.