THE PRE-ROMANTICS 88pointed out,^28 the classical Arabic poets members of the group read were
obviously confined to those of the Abbasid period, to whose works they
often referred in their writings. Secondly, their knowledge of western litera-
ture, ancient and modern, was not so great and intimate as is suggested here,
and it was derived through the English language. Thirdly, although the poet
boasts of their wide reading in English literature, when it comes to their
actual poetic output we find that the main influence comes from Palgrave's
The Golden Treasury. Fourthly, there is a cunning and deliberate omission of
the significance of the role of Shauqi's great contemporary, Khalil Mutran,
whose importance in the development of modern Arabic poetry 'Aqqad
grossly underrates in other places. Yet, despite its exaggeration, 'Aqqad's
account does reveal one or two significant points about his group: their
extreme reaction against Shauqi, and their direct indebtedness to western
literature and particularly English literature. The two points, in fact, are
not completely unrelated. 'Aqqad's group rejected Shauqi, because they came
to know specimens of English poetry which seem to involve totally different
principles. Their whole position is crystallized in their attitude to the question
of the unity of a poem - the very same question which, as we have seen, had
occupied Mutran's mind.
'Aqqad's detailed treatment of the matter is to be found in the collection
of critical essays which he wrote in conjunction with Mazini under the name
al-Dtwan and which the authors had hoped to produce in ten volumes. In
actual fact only two volumes appeared, in 1921,^29 and the main aim of the
authors in these two volumes was strongly similar to that of Dr Leavis in
Scrutiny, of debunking and attacking current orthodox values or the literary
Establishment. While Mazini concentrated his attack upon the popular prose
writer of the period, al-Manfoluti, the author of the sentimental and ornate
reflections-cum-short stories, Shauqi was the main butt of 'Aqqad's virulent
onslaught. 'Aqqad bases his spirited attack on a number of points, the most
important of which being the absence of unity in Shauqi's poems. He selects
as his example the Elegy on Mustafa Kamil; after a complete reshuffling in a
thoroughly amusing fashion, of the individual lines of which the poem
consists, in order to show that nothing is lost by a change of the order of its
composition. 'Aqqad concludes that the poem is nothing but 'a heap of sand
lacking in spirit, and in progression and devoid of a unifying feeling',^30 while
a good poem in his opinion 'ought to be one complete work of art, in which
one impulse or a number of homogeneous impulses are given a unified
form ... in such a way that if the order is changed or the proportions varied,
the unity of design is impaired and the whole work suffers'. The same need
for organic unity in the Arabic poem is insisted upon by Shukri, who, in the