IN THE UNITED STATES 185which bare statements need in order that they may be converted into poetry.
Taha Husain's judgment on the Mahjar school is perhaps truer of Jibran than
of many others: he describes the Mahjar poets as 'people endowed with a
fertile nature, strong talents, wide-ranging imagination, naturally qualified
to be good poets, but they have not perfected the means of poetry: they are
either ignorant of the language or they have ignored it and proceeded to
adopt their ignorance as a method or system'.^12
Typical of the Pen Association movement is the work of Jibran's life-long
friend, Mikha'3 Nu'aima, undoubtedly the movement's great critic and
apologist, just as Jibran was its sage and philosopher. Nu'aima had an
interesting and varied education. Bom in Biskinta in the Lebanon, in 1889
he received his primary education in a Russian school, then moved to the
Russian Teachers' Training College in Nazareth. After completing his four-
year course there he was sent to Russia in 1906 to pursue his further education
at the theological seminary in Poltava. In 1911 he returned to the Lebanon,
having acquired a wide knowledge of Russian literature and language:
he even wrote some of his poems like 'The Frozen River' first in Russian,
but in the following year (1912) he emigrated to America. He studied law
in Washington and graduated in 1916. During his studies he contributed
literary articles to al-Funun and al-Sa'ih. His first venture in literary criticism
was a review of Jibran's book The Broken Wings which, in spite of its critical
impartiality, expressed enough of the author's revolutionary spirit to make
Jibran seek to develop his acquaintance. In 1918 he joined the American
army and was sent to the French front, where he had first-hand experience
of the horrors of the First World War. After the war he was awarded a
government scholarship which enabled him to study French history and
art and literature at the University of Rennes.
Nu'aima wrote very little poetry. His poems, most of which were composed
early in his career, between 1917 and 1928, were collected and published
in one volume, Eyelid Whisperings,^13 in 1943. His prose output, however, was
large. As a prose writer he is known in the Arab world chiefly by his book
of criticism, The Sieve, which, together with the Diwan by 'Aqqad and Mazini,
is regarded as the most important attack on orthodoxy at the time. But
Nu'aima's prose works are not confined to literary criticism; they range
from drama to the novel, from essays and meditations to biography. The Sieve
contains much violent criticism of the shortcomings of the classical Arabic
poetic tradition, some of which reveals an extremist attitude. In this short
account there is not the space for a discussion of the whole book; however.