THE ROMANTICS 158of genius to possess an extraordinary power of assimilation. One remembers
Eliot's remark that Shakespeare managed to get more of the spirit of classical
civilization from North's translation of Plutarch's Lives than many classical
scholars did from the original texts. What al-Shabbi got from the Arabic
translations of western literature was the spirit and attitudes of the Romantics.
But then the Arabic translations available were themselves often confined to
Romantic works. Besides, the Arab creative writers and critics whom he read
at a very early age, and through whom he indirectly derived his western
ideas, people like the Mahjar poets and chiefly Jibran Khalil Jibran,^116 or
like 'Aqqad, Mazini and Abu Shadi, were themselves influenced by western
Romantic authors. In this respect, as his correspondence with him shows,
Shabbi also benefited from his friendship with the poet and critic Muhammad
al-Hilaiwi, who used to show him and discuss with him translations from
de Musset and Lamartine. They also often discussed contemporary Egyptian
literary periodicals and the general literary scene in Egypt to which Shabbi
looked as his source of cultural sustenance.^117
Shabbi's poems were first published in periodicals and newspapers,
especially in Abu Shadi's Apollo, which, according to his most devoted
scholar, was chiefly responsible for spreading his reputation in the Arab
world.^118 However, he died while preparing his collected poems for publica-
tion, his Dhvan which he was to call Songs of Life, and it was not until 1955 that
it saw the light of day.^11 ' Besides the poems, he published a number of articles
in various periodicals, and only one book of literary criticism, The Arab Poetic
Imagination, which came out in Tunis in 1929. This critical essay, originally
a public lecture which understandably shocked his predominantly con-
servative Tunisian audience, is in many ways an impressive performance,
coming as it did from a young man of twenty, with no knowledge of a single
European language. Whatever be its limitations, which arise from the
headiness of youth and its proclivity for making sweeping generalizations,
supported only by unconsciously highly selected evidence, two qualities it
did not lack: courage and integrity. The book opens with a general discussion
of imagination, then deals in separate chapters with the poetic imagination
in relation to Arab mythology, Arab attitudes to nature, to women and to
narrative literature, and ends with a general discussion of Arabic literature
and (predictably, for the period) the Arab spirit or the Arab mind.
Like the thorough-going romantic he is, Shabbi is keenly aware of the
importance of imagination, which he regards as essential to man in appre-
hending and interpreting reality as the air he breathes,^120 and of course he
sees the relation between it and metaphorical language. Shabbi finds Arab
mythology deficient in poetic imagination, compared with the Greek, Roman