Abstarct: The current study is an attempt to investigate whether background knowledge have any significant effect on Iranian EFL learners’ reading poem comprehension. To this end, 60 learners out of 97 Iranian EFL learners from six language classes in Shahrood, Iran were selected and divided into two equal groups of experimental and control group. A pretest was administered for the two selected groups. The experimental group received 12 sessions of special instruction to build background knowledge, utilizing THIEVES strategy (Manz, 2002), while the control group received the routine treatment of teaching poems. Each session lasted for one hour with the discussion of one English poem and the course was held three times a week. To analyze the gathered data independent samples t-tests were run. The findings revealed that instruction via THIEVES strategy to activate their background knowledge had a positively significant effect on Iranian EFL learners’ reading poem comprehension. That is, the THIEVES strategy enhanced the Iranian EFL learners’ reading poem comprehension.