The correction, authentication, validation and identification of the original texts in Hafez’s poetry among 16 or so old versions of his Divan has been a challenge for scholars. The semantic analysis of poetry with modern Digital Humanities techniques is also challenging. Analyzing latent semantics is more challenging in poetry than in prose for evident reasons, such as conciseness, imaginary and metaphorical constructions. Hafez’s poetry is, on the one hand, cryptic and complex because of his era’s restricting social properties and censorship impediments, and on the other hand, sophisticated because of his encapsulation of high-calibre world-views, mystical and philosophical attributes, artistically knitted within majestic decorations. Our research is strongly influenced by and is a continuation of, Mahmoud Houman’s instrumental and essential chronological classification of ghazals by Hafez. Houman’s chronological classification method (Houman, 1938), which we have adopted here, provides guidance to choose the correct version of Hafez’s poem among multiple manuscripts. Houman’s semantic analysis of Hafez’s poetry is unique in that the central concept of his classification is based on intelligent scrutiny of meanings, careful observation the evolutionary psychology of Hafez through his remarkable body of work. Houman’s analysis has provided the annotated data for the classification algorithms we will develop to classify the poems. We pursue to understand Hafez through the Houman’s perspective. In addition, we asked a contemporary expert to annotate Hafez ghazals (Raad, 2019). The rationale behind our research is also to satisfy the need for more efficient means of scholarly research, and to bring literature and computer science together as much as possible. Our research will support semantic analysis, and help with the design and development of tools for poetry research. We have developed a digital corpus of Hafez’s ghazals and applied proper word forms and punctuation. We digitized and extended chronological criteria to guide the correction and validation of Hafez’s poetry. To our knowledge, no automatic chronological classification has been conducted for Hafez poetry. Other than the meticulous preparation of our bilingual Hafez corpus for computational use, the innovative aspect of our classification research is two-fold. The first objective of our work is to develop semantic features to better train automatic classifiers for annotated poems and to apply the classifiers to unannotated poems, which is to classify the rest of the poems by applying machine learning (ML) methodology. The second task is to extract semantic information and properties to help design a visualization scheme to assist with providing a link between the prediction’s rationale and Houman’s perception of Hafez’s chronological properties of Hafez’s poetry. We identified and used effective Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques such as classification, word-embedding features, and visualization to facilitate and automate semantic analysis of Hafez’s poetry. We defined and applied rigorous and repeatable procedures that can potentially be applied to other kinds of poetry. We showed that the chronological segments identified automatically were coherent. We presented and compared two independent chronological labellings of Hafez’s ghazals in digital form, pro- duced their ontologies and explained the inter-annotator-agreement and distributional semantic properties using relevant NLP techniques to help guide future corrections, authentication, and interpretation of Hafez’s poetry. Chronological labelling of the whole corpus not only helps better understand Hafez’s poetry, but it is a rigorous guide to better recognition of the correct versions of Hafez’s poems among multiple manuscripts. Such a small volume of complex poetic text required careful selection when choosing and developing appropriate ML techniques for the task. Through many classification and clustering experiments, we have achieved state-of-the-art prediction of chronological poems, trained and evaluated against our hand-made Hafez corpus. Our selected classification algorithm was a Support Vector Machine (SVM), trained with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)-based similarity features. We used clustering to produce an alternative perspective to classification. For our visualization methodology, we used the LDA features but also passed the results to a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) module to reduce the number of dimensions to two, thereby enabling graphical presentations. We believe that applying this method to poetry classifications, and showing the topic relations between poems in the same classes, will help us better understand the interrelated topics within the poems. Many of our methods can potentially be used in similar cases in which the intention is to semantically classify poetry.