THE PRE-ROMANTICS 90Perhaps next to their insistence on the need to create an organic unity in
a poem comes the importance these three poets attached to the part played
by emotion in poetry. The poetry they advocated is primarily of a subjective
or personal nature. Although this does not constitute a completely new
departure in Arabic poetry, in this respect the influence of English literature
upon them is quite clear. As it has already been pointed out, the English
poetry they were most familiar with, and which they found most appealing,
was the poetry contained in Palgrave's The Golden Treasury, which is on the
whole biassed in favour of emotional, subjective or lyrical verse. Likewise,
the English literary critics they read and used as their guides (Hazlitt in the
case of 'Aqqad and Coleridge in the case of Shukri, who even adopted his
distinction between 'imagination' and 'fancy'),^34 were Romantic critics who
seemed to set a high, value on the role of emotion in poetry. 'What distin-
guishes a poet from the rest of men is the strength, depth and wide range of
his feelings and his ability to penetrate into the reality of things,' says
' Aqqad,^85 thus combining in one sentence both the emotive and the transcen-
dental theories of poetry. True poetry should never remain on the level of
the senses, but, he tells us, should go beyong the senses to the feelings and
the emotions: the only justification for a simile, therefore, is not mere apparent
external likeness, but the feeling and the emotion it conveys. In the same way
Shukri maintains that a true poet does not seek a simile for its own sake, and
in the second edition of his first volume of verse he uses as his epigraph the
following line:
O bird of paradise, poetry is but emotion (p. 266).The subject of his preface to the third volume (1915) is the importance of
emotion in poetry:
A great poet is not content with conveying knowledge or understanding
to people, but he tries to transport them into a state of ecstasy against their
will, mixing his emotions and feelings with theirs. The poetry of emotion
has a particular ring and tone which you cannot find in any other type of
poetry. One day people will wake UD to the realization that it alone is poetry,
(p. 209).Mazini defines poetry as an art 'of which the end is emotion, the means
imagination or a stream of related ideas directed by emotion'.^36
The best works produced by this group of poets were, therefore, of a
dominantly subjective nature, expressing the poet's own response to others
or to nature or to his metaphysical condition: poems of introspection, con-
fessional poems or poems which record a mood, usually one of sorrow and
despondency.