The emigrant poets
The Mahjar poets, i.e. the Arab poets who emigrated to America, form
such a distinct school of writing that they deserve separate treatment
Moreover, they exercised a profound influence upon their contemporaries
in the Arab lands, an influence which can be clearly seen not only in the
works of minor poets. Both historically and culturally the Mahjar poets
are an extension of Lebanese and Syrian poetry. Although they fell under the
influence of western Romantic poetry, directly or otherwise (and some of
them did that even before they emigrated to America), their early social,
economic, political and cultural background in their homeland helped, to
some extent, to shape their later output — although it is difficult to go as far
as some recent scholars who tend to attribute the romanticism of these poets
almost exclusively to their native background.^1
like the distinguished authors who emigrated to Egypt, where they settled
and took an active part in its intellectual and literary life, the Lebanese and
Syrian poets who turned to North and South America left their homeland
mainly for political or economic reasons or for both. The autocratic rule
of Sultan Abdul Hamid made life generally difficult for these educated and
freedom-loving Arabs who had enjoyed a modem education in European
and Russian establishments. At the same time because of the increasing
role of Europeans in the commercial life of the Lebanon after the 1860s there
were fewer possibilities for the Lebanese at home than abroad and especially
in the virgin lands of the New World.^2 The movement of immigration into
America began in the last decade of the nineteenth century and gathered
momentum in the course of time, so that we find no less than 9210 people
emigrating to North America alone in the year 1913.^3
One or two general introductory remarks about these emigrants, most
of whom were enterprising individualists, are in order. In the first place