Mu.ammad MuxyafmBadawl(May 1956, June 1956), and Laylfah al-Zayymt
(1964).^4 From Lebanon, there was Muna.Khnrl(January 1955). Eliot’s other
essay, “The Function of Criticism,” was no less appealing at a time when
young intellectuals were involved in writing on and researching the role of
literature in the formation of political and cultural consciousness.^5 As I shall
explain shortly, these writings in prose, along with translations and adapta-
tions or appropriations were meant to serve as a poetics of challenge and
innovation, which poets staunchly claim as their task to advance and explain.
Journals of repute were the platforms for that dissemination of knowledge,
and poets engaged throughout the 1950s and the 1960s in a fight with great
social, cultural, and political ramifications. As noticed by a number of
scholars,^6 poets found themselves fully involved in the politics of the period.
The case was so for a number of reasons that operated on cultural conscious-
ness, especially in the aftermath of the partition of Palestine, the Cold War,
and the increasing interest in the natural resources and strategic situation of
the area. Along with these factors, there were other occurrences, like the
emergence of new powers in the Middle East, the immediate political and fac-
tional implications of divisions between nationalist and Marxist ideologies,
and the clandestine Zionist strategy to collaborate with corrupt systems in
the region to evacuate local Jewish populations.
Masks
Poets of the early 1950s were on the lookout for a vision, a worldview, to
bring life to an otherwise dying land. Significantly, the literature of the
period was prone to heroic patterning, utopias, and epical or mythical regen-
erative structures to grasp and tackle aspirations. There was then a search for
the mythical god, or the savior and the redeemer, whether Christ, al->allmj
(executed and crucified in 922), or al->usayn (massacred in 680), to bring
about change and fertility.^7 The vision itself invites and invokes a new poet-
ics, in tandem with or in separation from classical tradition, with special
emphasis on theories of persona, mask, and dramatic monologue, along with
images, symbols, fertility myths, and historical constructs. In keeping with
the magic ritual, the existence of “masks” as possessing those who take them
on, the practice is a way to an integrated vision that is otherwise difficult to
attain. Released from subjectivity, the poet objectifies experience through
this persona or second self. In this instance the persona is an extension of the
mask ritual, as it opts for a full artistic vision. The mask for William Butler
Yeats becomes an objectifying practice. To reach wider audiences, this poetics
takes common language as a given. To use William Butler Yeats’ theory of lan-
guage and the mask, “We should write out our thoughts in as nearly as possi-
ble the language we thought them in, as though in a letter to an intimate
friend.”^8 The notion remained with him even in subsequent objectifications of
experience in a manner that was popular with Arab poets since the late 1940s.
THE TRADITION/MODERNITY NEXUS