enumerates three, for “the ancient mythology of the Middle East, the figures
of Biblical and Quranic narratives and English poetry, underlie the development
of modern Arabic poetry and the Tammuzi movement in particular.”
He attributes this attitude to an increasing awareness in politics, for this
“development is a phenomenon of the modern aspiration of the Arabs and
their deep longing to be alive and productive in the family of mankind.”^15
While these make their presence conspicuous in al-Baymtl’s poetry, his
tendency to raid other registers freely endows his poetry with a modernist
stamp that verges on futility and ennui. The ambivalent voice in The Waste
Landis more at home in al-Baymtl’s poetic pastiches.
There is also a pattern of poetic tension shared by Eliot and al-Baymtl.
While each has a specific poetic for a specific context, there are romantic and
anti-romantic traces that characterize their early poetry. In Eliot’s early poems
like “Portrait of a Lady” or even “Prufrock” there is what Eric Svarny terms
as accordance “with the dry, laconic distancing of personal emotions.”^16 This
may not be the case in al-Baymtl’s first collection, Malm’ikah wa-shaymyln
(Angels and Devils) (1950), where romantic assertiveness sustains its presence
despite the shadowy distancing of the melancholic speaker. Nevertheless, his
Broken Pitchers(1954) betrays a tendency to objectify experience and to con-
trol the Romantic excess of the first collection. A deliberate acquaintance
with the Imagists, and Ezra Pound in particular, and a leap into experimen-
tation, involve his poems into objectified structures that appropriate axioms,
proverbs, sayings, quotes, and allusions of every kind. Such an endeavor is
basic to al-Baymtl’s poetic career, for his poetry, before its mystical turn, is
more in dialogue with other texts. In ‘Uynn al-kilmb al-mayyitah(The Eyes of
the Dead Dogs 1969), Al-kitmbah ‘almal-yln(Writing on Clay 1970), and
Kitmb al-ba.r(The Book of the Sea), al-Baymtl’s use of the Eliotic correlative
becomes apparent. Although The Waste Landhas never disappeared from his
poetic register, its method of intertextuality and exteriorization of emotions
characterizes these early collections. Lorca and Hikmet had already offered
him a regenerative structure, a demythologized vision of struggle and contest,
but the application of shreds and fragments came in time to enable him to
cope with the unpleasant and the menacing. Paradoxically, in Autobiography
of the Thief of Fire (1974), Shiraz’s Moon (1975), The Kingdom of Grain
(1979), and Aisha’s Orchard (1989), al-Baymtltook leave from earlier inter-
ests and figures to pursue a mystical quest that made use of precursors,
including Arab poets and Muslim Sufis, while vying for a rapprochement
between the substantiality of the temporal “I” and spiritual fusion. Eliot of
“Ash Wednesday” should not be left out here, for, as Svarny argues, there is a
movement “towards an interior, common realm of spiritual realities” (p. 215).
In al-Baymtl’s “‘M’ishah’s Orchard,” she, who derives her presence from the
Babylonian Astarte and the women of such Sufis as Ibn ‘Arabl, resonates in
his collections of the third poetic phase, that is, after the phase of political
commitment, and faith in regenerative processes, as if in parallel to, or in
THE EDGE OF RECOGNITION AND REJECTION