If poetry does not carry a lantern from house to house
If the poor do not know what it ‘means’
We had better discard it!^13Other intellectuals felt the need for an avant-garde to lead the masses,
but this need has not lent itself to experimentation with techniques of an
innovative nature. While building on the role of the poet in Arab poetic
tradition, poets worked also within a modernist tendency to create a
process of perpetual rebirth from the ruins of that tradition which others
were bent on destroying. Like many fore-guards elsewhere, Arab poets in
the 1950s, also believed “... that to revolutionize art was the same as to
revolutionize life,” turning in the end “... against the stylistic expecta-
tions of the general public, whom the political revolutionists were trying
to win over through the use of the most platitudinous revolutionary prop-
aganda.”^14 The overall product and effort has a negotiatory stamp, as a
configuration of ancient, Islamic, populist, and modernist poetics emerges
out of the moment of tension in poetry where the poet attempts to cope
with the situation at hand. Indeed, al-Baymtl’s “Elegy to Khalil Hawi,”
may suggest as much, because his Ishtar (the goddess Astarte) sums up this
poetic engagement of many histories, dimensions, and prospects. As the
persona articulates,
She became the Nile and the Euphrates
Vows of the poor
Over the Atlas Mountains
A lyric in the poetry of Abu Tammam.
She became Beirut and Jaffa
An Arab wound in the cities of creativity
Vowed for love
Possessed by fire
She became Ishtar^15In these textual interventions, the modern poet is desperate to bring
together a number of concerns, more dense than Eliot’s scattered quotes,
the fragments shored against the psychic ruins, and to secure the poetic self
from an overwhelming consciousness of a dying civilization. The Arab poet,
and al-Baymtlis an example, collapses both the modernity impulse to
dissociate from the past and the postmodernist urge to court and voice the
marginalized and the parodic against the circumscribed and timeless givens
of some prevalent traditional thought. The Iraqi poet sojourns at a cross-
roads, where, as Matei Calinescu argues in respect to modernity, the
“... modern artist...[is]torn between his urge to cut himself off from the
past...and his dream to found a new tradition, recognizable as such by
the future.”^16
THE TRADITION/MODERNITY NEXUS