such accusations. Nevertheless, it survived attacks and bequeathed its legacy
to another journal, Mawmqif(Stations), which was started in 1968 in London.
The renowned Egyptian Marxist Luwls cAwa,(1915–1994) wrote against
these journals.^92 Al-Baymtlalso never tired of alluding to this history.^93
While strongly divided into factions with agenda and platforms like the
Lebanese journals Al-Mdmb(The Arts), Al-Yarlq(The Road), and Shicr, and
the Egyptian Al-Thaqmfah(Culture), the literati of the 1950s and the 1960s
had to cope with the challenge of the modern with its political underpin-
nings. Despite conflicting priorities, one can detect among these literary
factions a tendency to copy each other, and to duplicate terms, values, and
whole registers of political, aesthetic, and cultural accentuations and affilia-
tions, whenever traditions and literary history were called into question.
It should not be surprising, therefore, that criticism itself was tinged with a
partisan taste or a counter-drive to set things right. Although the voices
battling for precedence among the pioneers of the Free Verse Movement were
trapped in historical records and formalistic assessments, there were also read-
ings by nationalists like Kmzim Jawmd and fellow poets like al-Sayymb, which
tended to find fault with al-Baymtl’s poetry or to trace plagiarisms here
and there.^94 Taking the opposite position were the solid scholar and critic
I.smncAbbms (d. 2003) and Nihmd al-Takarll(b. 1925), who cited al-Baymtl
as the pioneer in modernity.^95 Al-Baymtl’s priorities were social and political,
but his meticulous care for ascendancy drove him to study every poet,
including his living rivals like al-Sayymb and, later, Adnnls. Indeed, al-Baymtl’s
Sufi poems carry numerous echoes from Adnnls, before the unmediated
engagements of the former since the early 1970s with Ibn cArabl(d. 1240) and
Manxnr al->allmj (d. 922).
The dialectics of tradition and modernity
However, both al-Baymtland Adnnls are attuned to experimentation. Whereas
al-Baymtlis keen on underlining his inventory and reiterating his landmarks
in a poetic topography of kingdoms, homelands, and underworlds, Adnnls
dilutes and erases. It is no wonder that his tendency to open up tradition and
religion beyond sacred principles passed undetected before the growth of
fundamentalism since the late 1980s.
Adnnls’ importance for any study of the intersectional dialectic of tradition
and modernity is beyond doubt. His intensive grounding in literary tradition
at an early time enabled him not only to manipulate heritage and use its
sources in an Eliotesque manner, but also to disseminate such a tendency
among his counterparts, leading a completely poetic endeavor thereafter into
expanding domains of intertextual negotiation beyond the impasse of the
Free Verse formalist innovation. Nmzik al-Malm’ikah (1923–) dwelt on the
issue of social roots of the Free Verse Movement, but her endeavor was
prompted by the urgency to legitimize innovation using classical roots and
THE TRADITION/MODERNITY NEXUS