ADUNIS AND THE NEW POETRY 231Unlike al-Mala'ika, other poets, such as some members of the Shi'r group,
are extreme revolutionaries who wish to cut themselves off from Arabic
literary conventions and align themselves with the cause of contemporary
poetry in the West. This is true, for instance, of Adunis and more particularly
Unsi al-Hajj, whose rejection of Arab traditional values is, at least in theory,
absolute, with the result that they came to be known as the poets of rejection
or dissent (shu'ara' al-rafd). Those who fell under French Symbolist and Sur-
realist influence (notably Adunis) have formed a view of poetry which has
metaphysical and mystical implications, a view which in the case of Adunis
has been translated into practice, resulting sometimes in poems of a rare and
haunting kind of beauty. Others on whom the influence of modern poetry in
English, particularly that of Eliot, is apparent (like al-Khal, Khalil Hawi and
al-Sayyab) have resorted to the use of aside, interior monologue and myth-
ology, allusions to popular songs and beliefs, and occasional use of col-
loquialisms. But the two influences have not been kept separate in the
writings of these poets, and each group has learnt something from the tech-
niques of the other. After all, Adunis translated Eliot and Sayyab Aragon. And
perhaps the most important common feature of the New Poetry is its syntax
and its peculiar use of imagery. This is the feature that links it to contem-
porary western poetry. The modem Arabic poet, whether he is a Marxist or
an existentialist, deliberately avoids the language of statement: in this he has
learnt from the experience of romanticism, which relies upon the evocative
power of words, but he has gone a step further in resorting to an oblique style,
to imagery as a means of objectifying his emotional experience. In thinking in
imagery, as it were, he sometimes transcends logic, and it is often the absence
of logical relationships, and all explicit connections that makes the syntax of
this poetry as difficult as in the case of the most obscure modem western
poetry. Bayyati was absolutely right when he wrote in 1968: 'Innovation in
poetry is not so much a rebellion against metres, prosody and rhyme, as some
seemed to think, as it is a revolution in expression' (Diwan n,411).Adunis and the New Poetry
The most articulate and sophisticated apologist for the New Poetry is un-
doubtedly Adunis ('Ali Ahmad Sa'id), who was bom in a little Syrian village
near Latakia in 1930, but who has enjoyed Lebanese nationality for many
years. Adunis graduated in philosophy from the Syrian University in 1954,
but in 1956 he left Syria where he had been engaged in hectic political activity
in connection with the Syrian Nationalist Party at a time when most Syrian
students belonged either to it or to the Communist Party. His revolutionary
political activity at one point landed him in jail, a thing which occasioned
some poetry of violent social and political protest against the authorities. He