THE ROMANTICS 130
to practice medicine until his death. At an early age he developed a passionate
interest in literature which he managed to sustain all through his life. He
admired greatly the poems of Mutran, some of which he seemed to have
learnt by heart. His knowledge of English and French enabled him to read
much of western literature and western thought, especially in the field of
psychology. His reading in western literature was selective but deep, and the
authors whom he found most congenial to his temperament were the roman-
tics. According to the poet Salih Jaudat, he, together with Taha, Hamshari
and Jaudat himself, used to meet as young men in the Delta town of Mansura
(where they all lived at some point) to discuss the poetry of Wordsworth,
Shelley and Keats, as well as their own creative efforts.^47 Naji translated
Shelley, Lamartine, de Musset and Baudelaire. He admired especially Baude-
laire and D. H. Lawrence: on the former he published posthumously a long
detailed study accompanied by a translation of many poems from Les Fleurs
du Mai. His literary activities included essays on general topics, such as The
Message of Life, and How to Understand People (a popularization of modem
psychology), and literary criticism for instance, the book which he wrote
jointly with Isma'il Adham on Taufiq al-Hakim, Taufiq al-Hakim, The Restless
Artist.
Naji's poems are collected in three volumes: the first came out in 1934
under the title Behind the Clouds, the second. The Nights of Cairo, was published
in 1951, and the third, The Wounded Bird,'* was published posthumously in
- (A complete edition of his poetry was published in 1961 under the
auspices of the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, but unfortunately by a strange
error it includes more than a dozen poems by the younger poet Kamal
Nash'at.^49 ) Of the Egyptian romantic poets Naji is perhaps the most subjec-
tive. Practically the entire content of his three volumes of verse concerns the
poet's most intensely personal experiences. There is remarkably little interest
in wider issues, social or political in his work: to be exact there are four
political poems, and one poem on a public theme, 'The Burnt Wings', which
laments the death of Egyptian pilots in an air-crash.^50 In these public poems
Naji's poetic style seems to be inappropriate: it is not declamatory enough
for such public occasions. He also wrote seven elegies, six of which were on
poets, four on Shauqi,^51 and eight poems close to panegyrics or social compli-
ments addressed to people in high office." The rest of Naji's poetry is about
the poet himself, his feelings and attitudes, and nearly all of it turns round
the subject of love. As epigraph to his second volume of verse he uses these
words which can be regarded as his poetic creed: 'I regard poetry as the
window out of which I look at life and eternity... it is the air I breathe, the
balsam in which I have sought to cure the wounds of my soul when phy-
sicians were rare to find.'
