THE PRE-ROMANTICS 110and the durability of stone. His neoclassical roots can be seen not only in his
attempt to imitate the work of the medieval mystic Ibn al-Farid in Divine
Wine' (p. 77) - a lifeless exercise lacking the spontaneity and fervour of the
original — or in his deriving inspiration from the poets, Ibn al-Rumi and
Mutanabbi (pp. 41, 313), but also in his use of traditional imagery or vocabu-
lary in a poem addressed to 'The Goddess of Love, Venus'^49 (p. 75), which is a
perfect illustration of the uneasy alliance between the two elements in
'Aqqad's literary formation.
The influence of English poetry on' Aqqad is revealed not only in his verse
translations from English poetry, which include free renderings of texts from
Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, Romeo and Juliet and Othello (pp. 38, 67),
and poems by Bums and Cowper (pp. 110, 114). There is a deeper influence
which pervades much of his work. It is to be found even in a poem which the
poet claims to have been inspired by the great classical Arabic poet Ibn al-
Rumi. 'First Love' is a long poem of over 160 lines which contains many lines
expressing 'Aqqad's attitude to man, nature and society. The poem opens
with a description of spring and the beauty of nature, then it tells of the poet's
love for all living things, which leads to an account of his passion for his
beloved, and of the pleasures of love which he enjoyed until slanderers put an
end to his happiness. In times of sorrow the poet says he turns to poetry for
refuge: then follows a description of poetry in which he claims that the source
of poetry is 'the breath of Divinity'. Among men a great poet is like a god,
for poetry is creative. In fact poetry is life, since feeling and emotion mean
life while reason or intellect equals death. The poet's thoughts turn again to
society, the cause of his unhappiness in love, and here his sense of super-
iority to others and of his being a stranger amongst his own people, of his
uprootedness, is most striking. Despite the traditional love situation with
the stock character of the slanderer it is obvious that the poem is heavily
influenced by English Romanticism, from the love of nature and all living
things (Blake and Coleridge) to the conception of poetry as divine breath
(Shelley) and as life itself (Hazlitt) and of the poet as a god (Carlyle, Emer-
son).^90 In his prose introduction to the second volume of his Diwan (1917)
'Aqqad rebuffs Peacock's attack on poetry on the grounds that it belongs to
the infancy of mankind and that it is therefore not fit for an age of science,
endorsing Victor Hugo's arguments in defence of poetry and claiming that
poetry will come to an end only when life itself ceases. Poetry, he says, will
disappear only with the disappearance of its springs which are the beauties
and terrors of nature and the emotions and aspirations of the soul (pp. 136—
7).
In a poem entitled 'The Blind Poet' (p. 33), 'Aqqad writes that a blind