THE ROMANTICS 172Abu RishaThere are no such mystical moments in the work of the Syrian poet TJmar
Abu Risha (1910 — ).^138 Abu Risha was born near Aleppo in a well-to-do
literary family and received his early education in Syria, but he pursued his
later studies in the American University of Beirut, and subsequently in
England where he studied industrial chemistry in Manchester. He did not
complete his studies in England but returned to Aleppo in 1932, and from
that time onwards he concentrated on poetry and politics. For some time he
occupied the post of librarian of Aleppo Public Library, and later held a
number of diplomatic posts ranging from Syrian cultural attache" in the Arab
League in Cairo to Syrian and United Arab Republic ambassador in Brazil,
India and Austria. Abu Risha has published four volumes of verse:^139 Poems
(1936), By 'UmarAbu-Risha (1947), Selections (1959) and finally CollectedWorks,
vol. i (1971). He has also written several verse dramas: Dhi Qar, The Poet's
Trial. al-Husain ibn'AH and Semiramis.^14 "
In an interview Abu Risha is reported to have said that in the beginning of
his poetic career he loved the great classical poets of the Abbasid era: al-
Buhturi and Abu Tammam, and their followers among the modem neo-
classicists such as Shauqi, but he gradually grew tired of them and began to
look for the more individualistic voices in the tradition. In England he fell in
love with Shakespeare (whose Venus and Adonis he regards as the greatest
poem ever written on the subject of love), Shelley, Keats, Baudelaire, Poe,
Morris, Hood, Milton, Tennyson, Browning, Thomas Gray and Oscar Wilde.
He admitted he was not fond of Hugo and Lamartine, but that his favourite
poets were Poe and Baudelaire.^141 To these two strands of his literary forma-
tion we should add the influence of the Mahjar poetry, which was strength-
ened by an early disappointment in love on account of the death of his
beloved at the age of seventeen, whom he commemmorated in an elegy
The End of Love' (1932). However, it is interesting that Abu Risha has de-
clared that he was not fond of poets such as Lamartine, for his poetry suffers
less from the tearful sentimentality of the French Romantics than many of
his contemporary Arab poets. Early in his career he developed in his poems a
robustness and a virility of tone, a joyful, fun-loving and pleasure-seeking
outlook, and a hedonistic and a masterful attitude to beautiful women, which
in some ways reminded his readers of his namesake the celebrated Early
Islamic love poet 'Umar ibn Abi Rabi'a.^142 His verse play The Poets' Trial,
in which the best-known modern poets from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt,
both neoclassicists and romantics, are tried by Apollo and Minerva and other
Greek deities, is a satirical attack on the neoclassical style and a plea for