tracing many poetic voices in al-Baymtl’s poetry, for “Al-Bayati read
Mayakovsky, Nazim Hikmet, Paul Eluard, Aragon, Lorca and Neruda.
All of whom left a mark on his poetry,” he writes.^19 Other influences on the
whole poetic scene have already been discussed by Jabra, who rightly includes
Edith Sitwell, especially on al-Sayymb, Artaud, Apollinaire, St John Pearse,
and Jacques Prevert.^20
Eliot as an Anglo-American avant-gardepoet drew the attention of Arab
poets in the modernist tradition. Like al-Sayymb, al-Baymtlfelt some alignment
with the undertakings of Eliot, as translated and paraphrased by the Lebanese
Mounah Khouri in a number of journals, but especially in Al-Mdmb.^21 Eliot’s
opposition to the insularity of contemporary tradition, its inertia and artifi-
ciality, received al-Baymtl’s unequivocal approval. Al-Baymtlalso felt the need
to disseminate his views in essays, interviews, and articles coordinated with
young critics and writers who gave the literature of the 1950s and the 1960s
its urgency, warmth, and polemical tone.
The line of demarcation that Eliot draws between the static and the
dynamic in tradition came as a rescue to Arab poets who were searching for
a method to conceptualize their poetic contribution in the face of hostile
criticism. Again, Mounah Khouri made it possible to understand Eliot’s
position on tradition in modern poetry. Eliot suggests that tradition in a
static society is bound to lapse “into superstition” and degenerate into imitation
and artificiality.^22
The dynamic in tradition was present in the minds of both al-Sayymb and
al-Baymtl, but it was not put to use until later. Like other pioneering voices,
al-Baymtlwas desperate to shock and destabilize conventions in his early
poems. His ‘Broken Pitchers’ responded to Modernism first and foremost.
It was only at a later period, 1957–1963, and with the growing presence of
Al-Shi‘rgroup in Beirut that echoes of Eliot’s focus on the dynamic in tradi-
tion began to be heard, to materialize in poetic representations and figura-
tions usually borrowed from a tradition of dissent. Al-Macarrlappeared quite
often in his poetry, while al-Mutanabblcontinued to be divided into two
voices, that of the rebel and that of the panegyrist. Al-Baymtlaligned himself
with the first, as if agreeing with Eliot “not only the best, but the most indi-
vidual parts of his [the poet’s]work may be those in which the dead poets, his
ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.”^23
The implications of tradition relate to concepts of poetry, too. Even if the
poet is a Christ figure, not the prophet of earlier generations, there is an over-
riding presence of the figure of the poet in exile. While Eliot’s term of “exile”
at the close of section IV of “Ash Wednesday” appropriates a Catholic prayer
at the end of the Mass, there is in it a combination of the Dantesque banish-
ment and the sense of poetic alienation. In Svarny’s view, Eliot plays on both
meanings to advance his vision of poetry in an uncongenial society.^24 Such a
sense of exile, along with others, recurs in al-Baymtl’s poetry in the context of
the Arab predicament, as conceived by a number of poets. The poet in this
THE EDGE OF RECOGNITION AND REJECTION