THE RECOIL FROM ROMANTICISM 218regards as closely akin to mysticism, and he devotes much space to an attack
on the conventional Marxist view, pointing out that poetry affirms values like
truth, freedom and justice. This position, obviously a continuation of a
development which began earlier, was no doubt accentuated by Arab mili-
tary defeat in 1967, which encouraged a withdrawal from painful external
reality and is not confined to poetry, but can also be noticed in other aspects
of Arabic literature.^23Another Egyptian poet, Ahmad 'Abd al-Mu'tiHijazf (b.1935), gives his first
collection of poems the self-explanatory title Heartless City (1959), and writes
movingly about the loneliness, bewilderment and anxiety, the feeling of loss
and fear of anonymity experienced in the great and impersonal metropolis
of Cairo by those simple souls drawn to it from the countryside.^24 In 'Good-
night'he says:
The streets of the big city are pits of fire,
At noon they ruminate the flames they have absorbed in the morning.
Unhappy is the man who has known only their sun,
Their buildings and their railings, their railings and their buildings,
Their squares, their triangles and their glass, (pp. 128ff.)
In his elegy on a village boy run over by a car in the city street Hijazi says
ruefully, since nobody could identify the boy:
Eyes met
No one answered
In the big city people are mere numbers:
One boy came
One boy died. (pp. 143ff.)
Hijazi's attitude to the city later loses something of its intensity in the two
subsequent volumes: There Remains Only Confession (1965) and Elegy on the
Handsome Life (1973). This is due partly to the fact that the poet was no longer
the bewildered newcomer to Cairo, but had grown more accustomed to fairly
complex urban living, partly to the measure of recognition he had received
which made him feel less of an outsider. He was now in fact writing songs
for the Arab Socialist Union in which he hoped to find the answer to problems
of urban life (p. 326). Hijazi's first volume, however, is, as the author of the
somewhat wordy introduction to the first edition says, 'a document that bears
witness to our age and depicts our generation' (p. 95). It is interesting to see
how far the reaction against romanticism has gone in the poet's generation.
The first poem in that volume, 'At the Age of Sixteen', shows us the poet in
effect saying that he has outgrown Naji's poetry and the values it represents.