EXPERIMENTS IN FORM 225symbolist or surrealist poets connected with the avant-garde magazine Shi'r
(1957—64; 1967—1969) — itself a powerful means of propagating modern
anti-romantic attitudes. It is true that these poets generally opposed social
realism and Marxism: on more than one occasion Yusuf al-Khal claimed that
any form of political ideological commitment is harmful to art and distorts
its nature, and those 'who call for the exploitation of literature and art in the
effort of construction or reconstruction [of society] do harm to literature and
art'.^37 However, they share with the Marxists their dislike for Romanticism
which some of them regard as 'a disease'.^38
The revolt of the so-called 'new' poetry was not confined to its rejection
of romantic themes and style. Formally at least, it was more extreme than
any other revolt modern Arabic poetry had seen so far. It has rejected most
of the basic conventions of Arabic verse. Put superficially, a printed page of
'new' poetry looks different from Arabic verses written before the late 1940s:
what is known in Arabic as bait, the line that consisted of two hemistichs of
equal length or metrical value, has disappeared and has been replaced by
lines of unequal length. So fashionable has this revolution in prosody proved
to be that some poems which really follow the traditional metrical pattern
have been arranged by their authors on the page in such a way that they are
made to look metrically new (this was done even by distinguished poets like
the Sudanese al-Faituri and the Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish).^39 For a
long time poets had been searching for new metrical forms which would
allow a greater freedom of self-expression and would enable the poet to real-
ize a truly organic unity in his work, would extend the scope of Arabic poetry
so as to make possible the writing of verse drama that was truly dramatic
and not lyrical, like Sa'Id 'Aql's plays, or rhetorical, like those by Shauqi or
'Aziz Abaza. Recently the story of this long quest and hectic experimentation
with verse form has been thoroughly studied by at least two scholars of the
period.^40 The new form that has found acceptance virtually throughout the
entire Arab world is that connected with the names of the Iraqi poets Badr
Shakir al-Sayyab and Nazik al-Mala'ika, and which relies upon the use of the
single foot (taf'ila) as the basic unit, instead of a fixed number of feet or a com-
bination of certain different feet per line. Like Bayyati, both Sayyab and
Mala'ika are graduates of the Teachers'Training College in Baghdad. Which of
these two poets was the first to use this new form has been the subject of keen
controversy, and claims of priority have been made by each poet and for each
poet by several writers.^41 The issue was complicated by the fact that both
poets published the poems in which they used what they regarded as a new
experimental form, in December 1947. Nazik al-Mala'ika's poem'al-Kulira'
(Cholera) appeared in the Beirut magazine al-'Uruba (1 December 1947),