Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition

in elitist domains, as Philip Kennedy persuasively argues.^2 In more than one instance, modern poetics converges with the deviat ...

The norm as set in the example above allows space for different personal accentuations, but the poem has to share a common code ...

literary sensibility like Frazer’s The Golden Bough, the writer focuses on four applications, namely, (1) Theodor Gaster’s Thesp ...

Jmhillor pre-Islamic qaxldah. The movement of the poem as such establishes a form that answers to the poetics of the period. Thi ...

Jmhillritual and ceremonial forms to buttress the authority of the Prophet and the nascent Islamic state by identifying them wit ...

pattern, this critique falls into a formalist trap that alienates the craft from its formative burgeoning. Normative patterning ...

a contextual horizon of expectation, but also the appeal of an oracular testimo- nial with promises and/or portents. The ancient ...

O BannUmayyah, it was I who defended you From the men of a tribe that sheltered and aided [the Prophet]. I silenced the BannNajj ...

expectations. AbnNuwms’s (d. 813) transgressions were permissible, not only due to the Caliph al-Amln’s acceptance, a fact that ...

Sufis, the quest as propelled by the beloved’s departure is the trial. The journey takes “two notions of stages,” however, as Mi ...

future.^19 The poem shows the pitfalls of imitation and overblown rhetoric when engaging issues of modernity and progress. In su ...

Deep into the enchanted darkness She couldn’t imprison spring in her orchard I saw a flowering branch in the gloom, Leaning over ...

random intellectualizations. The poetic and the real have to negotiate a selfhood, not only in matters of position, but also in ...

and half Asia, Asia moons dangling from the trellis dome on hempen ropes and mourn by night in crazed cities Asia, Asia province ...

whole record and scene indicates an emerging consciousness in search for meaning amid the old and the new, the desert and the ci ...

Release comes through this grounding, and the spark is ignited in the poem as epiphany: My elect state overwhelmed me: I was sei ...

The question culminates at the threshold of the ruined campsite: At Jaffa’s gates, O beloved ones, Among the chaotic wreckage of ...

identify with the displaced and the uprooted, gains power through the layering of textual and formulaic association and recapitu ...

The pre-Islamic poet traces in the ruins an image of a departing beloved, to whom it is his role to give form and life in poetry ...

without lapsing into pathetic fallacy, al-Sayymb gathers devices and images of anticipation and sorrow which he animates as chil ...