THB ROMANTICS 116in the Apollo Society of which Abu Shadi was virtually the founder and
Naji the vice-president, the spirit of romanticism which had already begun
to make itself felt in the Mahjar poetry, swiftly spread and dominated much
of the poetry written in the 1930s and the 1940s in most Arabic-speaking
countries.
Abu Shadi and the Apollo GroupAbu Shadi was born in Cairo in 1892. His father was an eminent lawyer and
orator and his mother had a gift for memorizing and composing verses. He
was educated in the modern (secular) primary and secondary schools, and at
the early age of sixteen, while he was still at school, he published a volume of
verse and prose, On Literature and Society, under an amusingly old-
fashioned rhyming title (1908),^1 which he followed with two other volumes
in the next two years. In these early literary efforts, the influence of Mutran's
poetry and of his reading in English literature is clear. Partly to recover from
the shock of an unsuccessful love affair he left for England in 1912 where
he studied medicine. The ten years he spent in England were full of hectic
activity, in which he revealed an unusually wide range of interests. He dis-
tinguished himself in his medical studies. He set up a society for bee-keeping
which had its own periodical Bee World. He studied English literature in somt
detail, especially the works of the Romantics, as is clearly shown in his two
collections of articles, Echoes of Life (covering the years 1910-2 5) and The Field
of Literature (1926-8). He admitted his great debt to Wordsworth, Shelley,
Keats and Heine.^2 His mastery of the English language reveals itself in the
number of quite competent poems he composed in it. In the meantime, he
retained his deep interest in Arabic literature, writing poems and articles
which he continued to contribute to Egyptian papers and reviews while he
was away. In 1922 he returned with his English wife to Egypt, and almost
immediately he resumed his literary and social activities. He founded several
scientific and agricultural societies, editing their various periodicals. In the
meantime Abu Shadi never ceased to write Arabic poetry. In 1932 he formed
the epoch-making Apollo Society with its well-known review which, for lack
of financial support and because of powerful political opposition, he was
obliged to close down in its third year with the publication of the twenty-
fifth issue in December 1934. He later edited two other literary reviews
which did not meet with such success as Apollo: al-lmam (the Leader) and
al-Huda (Guide). In 1942 he occupied the chair of Bacteriology in the Univer-
sity of Alexandria, but in 1946 after the shock of his wife's death, and feeling
bitter disappointment because instead of receiving the recognition he
deserved he felt he was being deliberately and actively obstructed for political