THE RECOIL FROM ROMANTICISM 214of that great revolutionary Che" Guevara whom I regarded as the symbol and
the only remaining hope for the wronged and oppressed workers and intel-
lectuals of the world' (II,406). He claims that these factors have led him to
seek a mode of self-expression in which he 'tried to reconcile the mortal and
the eternal, the finite and the infinite, the present and that which transcends
the present'. He therefore searched for suitable artistic masks in the worlds
of history, symbols and myths, through which crisis could be expressed on
social as well as cosmic levels. The mask, he says, is 'the name through which
the poet speaks divested, as it were, of his own subjectivity'. By deliberately
creating an entity that has its own independent existence 'the poet tran-
scends the limitations of lyricism and romanticism which have beset most
Arabic poetry', In this manner ' the poem becomes a world independent of
the poet, although created by him', free from the masks of 'distortion', emo-
tionalism and 'psychological ailments with which subjective romantic poetry
abounds' (n,407—8). The masks which Bayyati uses in his later poetry include
a wide variety of personages, historical and fictitious, such as the classical
Arab poets Tarfa, Abu Firas of Hamdan, Mutanabbi, Dik al-Jinn, Ma'arri,
the Persian poet and mathematician Khayyam, the Sufi martyr Hallaj, Alex-
ander the Great, Hamlet, Sindbad, Che Guevara, Picasso, Hemingway, Nazim
Hikmet, Albert Camus, and 'A'isha the Iraqi girl killed by despots; the
symbols include the Koranic many-columned city of Iram, books such as
The Arabian Nights, Hariri's Maqamat, cities and rivers such as Damascus,
Naisapur, Granada, Madrid, Cordova and Euphrates. Many of these had been
used by him earlier, not as masks or symbols, but as allusions, for Bayyati's
poetry, at least starting from the volume Twenty Poems from Berlin, is full of
allusions, not only to people and places, myths and events, but also to parti-
cular poems. This is a feature which he clearly adopted from the poetry of
T. S. Eliot. But now the problem with which he is concerned seems to be 'how
to present the ideal hero of our time (and of all times) in an extreme situa-
tion', how to get under his skin and 'portray his feelings when he is passing
through the most meaningful moments in his life', and 'how to express the
social and cosmic crisis faced by such a personage' (n,409). In the final analy-
sis the ideal hero, we learn, is the revolutionary who is also the poet/artist and
the lover. Referring us to his poem on the suffering of Hallaj, he says, 'The
death of lovers, rebels and artists is the bridge which civilization and man-
kind cross to reach a more perfect existence' (n415). Bayyati seems to adopt
a strangely materialist philosophical position, fraught with elements of
pantheism and mysticism, for which he finds support in ancient Babylonian
literature. Put simply, it is that the spirit of life is ever renewing itself and
death is merely the return of the part to the whole (n,476), or, on apolitical