THE ROMANTICS 122Abu Shadi explained his conception of poetry in many articles and pre-
faces to his own and other poets' volumes of verse, but it is perhaps in his
poem 'The New' (in his collection The Weeping Twilight 1926)^17 that we find
a compact poetic statement of his interests and attitudes to the tradition.
Abu Shadi describes himself as a songbird whose song pleases the ear but
also moves the hearers' feelings, a revolutionary who loathes all chains
because of his keen sense of freedom. He does not compose verse for the
sake of glory or to display his skill, but because of his passion for poetry,
the poetic ideal being the object of his dreams and all that he regards as
worthwhile is devoted to it. Poetry conveys wisdom of a kind that brings
comfort and bliss in its wake, not the wisdom of philosophers like Avicenna.
In his wisdom he does not try to emulate the sad thoughts of Ma'arri, or
the ideas of Bashshar, the wise saws of Mutanabbi the playful bucolic verse
of Abu Nuwas or the pleasurable songs of Shauqi. He scrutinizes the universe,
soars to its heights and plumbs its depths, roams all over life in search of
inspiration, communing with nature which reveals her secrets to him, and
he in turn hands them over to the reader, but in a form in which they are
made richer and more beautiful by his verse: he sings and describes them
without exaggeration either in colour or in tone or sound, but every idea is
given its own dignity and worth. He is the worshipper of beauty in nature
to which he prays in the manner of a mystic, and the custodian of his people's
glorious past which he celebrates in immortal song in an honest and courage-
ous attempt to bring them to create a present worthy to be compared with
their past. Such, he says, is the picture of the poetry he conceives, a poetry
that does not care for ornament or over-elaborate phrase, that does not
concern itself with eulogy, congratulations, all manner of folly, drunken-
ness and immorality, cheating the people or rejoicing in high-sounding
titles, but a poetry that strives to breathe a new life into the people, inspiring
in them the pursuit of glory and the ideal. Here we find an account, albeit
idealized, of Abu Shadi's aims and themes and an implied criticism of the
contemporary poetic scene which was still dominated by neoclassical poets
who strove to emulate the poet or poets who rejoiced in hollow and meaning-
less titles. Although the poet is a worshipper of beauty he is no mere anaemic
aesthete or idle dreamer but a serious moralist who is pledged to serve the
wider interests of his fellow men and his country.
Abu Shadi had remarkable powers of description, especially in his nature
poetry. He was one of the most important nature poets in modern Arabic:
the landscape and scenes he described are varied, ranging from Egypt to
England and America, and we have seen how early in his career he wrote
poetry on the local orange trees. He described local Egyptian birds like