THE RECOIL FROM ROMANTICISM 226while al-Sayyab included his, entitled 'Hal kana hubban' (Was it Love?) in
his volume of verse Azhdr Dhabila (Withered Flowers). But it has been
pointed out that the two poets did not develop this form independently, but
that on the contrary they frequently met in Baghdad to discuss poetry and
exchange ideas, and that far from being an entirely new departure the new
form, known as al-shi'r al-hurr (literally = free verse), was a culmination of a
long series of prosodic experiments started early in the century, and that in
fact externally the new form had been developed before these Iraqi poets by
the Egyptian Muhammad Farid Abu Hadld and the Indonesian-born Egyp-
tian Bakathir, in their attempt to write (or translate) poetic drama. It is indeed
futile to try to establish which modem Arabic poet was the first to use this
new form, nor is there any glory attached to such precedence. For the fact
is that poets of the generation born in the 1920s were searching for a new,
freer form around the same time (during or shortly after the Second World
War), and it is more than likely that several poets quite independently
worked out the same or similar solutions simultaneously. The present author
can affirm that his own experiments, which were made along similar lines at
roughly the same time (and which were subsequently published in the volume
Rasd'il min London, 1956), had been arrived at in England completely in-
dependently. Likewise, Yusuf al-Khal tells us that he pursued his own in-
dependent experiments in complete isolation when he was living in New
York between 1948 and 1955.^42
What is interesting, however, is the close link between these post-war
experiments and the conscious reaction against romanticism. Writing about
this new form in the periodical Adab, Sayyab says that it had arisen to destroy
the Vagueness or dilution of romanticism' and the 'literature of the ivory
tower', no less than the stagnation of classicism, as well as the declamatory
verse which the political and social poets have been in the habit of writing,
and although Nazik al-Mala'ika insisted on more than one occasion that the
new form is primarily a prosodic phenomenon, she claimed that one of the
main factors that led to its appearance is the tendency towards realism and
away from romanticism, because of the greater freedom and simpler diction
afforded by the new form.^43 It was no wonder then that this new form, used
with or without rhyme, was strongly opposed by the literary establishment,
even ironically enough by a former rebel like 'Aqqad,^44 for apart from the
general cultural considerations involved in this phenomenon which re-
presented a direct threat to traditional values, romanticism itself had by that
time lost its revolutionary zeal and become part of the literary establishment.
An even more extreme form used by some poets does without the principle
of prosody altogether; it is either free verse or the prose poem (which, accord-