THB RECOIL FROM ROMANTICISM 210Bayyati and the committed poets
This then Is the general cultural and critical background of the recoil from
romanticism, against which much of Arabic poetry written after the Second
World War has to be read. The poet who is generally regarded as the most
committed Arab poet and as the leader of the socialist realist movement in
modem Arabic poetry is the Iraqi 'Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayyati (b. 1926).
Bayyati, a graduate of the Teachers' Training College in Baghdad, was forced
on account of his Communist beliefs to wander abroad in Arab countries and
in Europe, particularly in Eastern Europe and Russia where he lived and
lectured for some time. Understandably, much of his poetry has been trans-
lated into Russian and Chinese. Bayyati is a prolific writer who has published
several volumes of verse: Angels and Devils (1950), Broken Pitchers (1954),
Glory be to Children and the Olive Branch (1956), Poems in Exile (1957), Twenty
Poems from Berlin (1959), Words that Never Died 960), Fire andWords (1964),
Poems (1965), The Book of'Povertyand Revolution (l965),What will Come andwill
not Come (1966), Death in Life (1968), The Dead Dogs' Eyes (1969) and Inscrip-
tions in Clay (1970). In 1971 appeared his Collected Poems (Diwari), together
with a prose work (first published separately In 1968) giving an account of his
poetic experience and his reflections as poet, in two volumes. His latest col-
lection of verse is entitled Love Poems on the Seven Gates of the World (1971).^18
Bayyati read widely, including Mayakovsky, Nazim Hikmet (who became
a friend to whom he addressed poems), Paul Eluard, Aragon, Lorca and
Neruda among others. He translated Aragon (to whom he also addressed a
poem), and Lorca's death is a theme that haunts him in at least two volumes:
What will Come and will not Come and Death in Life. All these poets clearly left
their mark on Bayyati's style and attitudes. In the recent edition of his poems
he quotes with approval Boris Pasternak's statement that 'Romanticism is
only the poetic content of the petit bourgeois' (n,373), Yet, as has been said
earlier on, Bayyati began by writing poetry in the romantic idiom. This is
clearly seen in his first volume Angels and Devils, particularly in poems such
as 'A Poet's Dream' and 'Solitude'.^19 It is in the second volume, Broken Pitchers,
that he finds his true voice. In one of its best-known poems, 'The Village
Market', Bayyati inaugurated a fashion of writing poems about the country-
side in which only the poor peasant is idealized, while every grim detail of his
wretched life is realistically portrayed, in great contrast to the 'romantic'
image of the village made popular in works such as Songs of the Hut by the
Egyptian Mahmud Hasan Ismail. Likewise, in Bayyati's work the city is
a menacing place where fear is born, crimes are committed and the wretched-
ness of the sick and starving masses is doubled, as we find in the poem
entitled "Night, the City and Tuberculosis'. In the title poem, 'Broken Pitchers',
the poet expresses his boundless hope for the emancipation of the proletariat: