THE RECOIL FROM ROMANTICISM 232
then fled to Beirut where he has been living ever since, except for one year
(1960) which he spent in Paris, studying at the Sorbonne at the expense of the
French government. Adunis has published several volumes of verse: Delilah
(1950), The Earth has Said (1952, then 1954), First Poems (1957), If I say, Syria
(1958), Leaves in the Wind (1958), Songs of Mihyar the Damascene (1961), The
Book of Metamorphosis and Migration in the Regions ofDay and Night (1965), The
Stage and the Mirrors (1968), A Time between Ashes and Roses (1970) and most
recently A Tomb for New York (1971): an edition of his Complete Works (from
which some of the early poems have been deliberately omitted) appeared in
- At least in his earlier period, Adunis shows himself to be a meticulous
craftsman who continually revises his poetry, generally shortening it, making
it tighter, and getting rid of the more explicit statements and of many poems
of political and social criticism which are of a more direct nature, especially
his severe attacks on Syrian authorities for jailing him and his wholesale
condemnation of Syrian and Arab society.
Adunis's pronouncements on contemporary Arabic poetry have recently
been collected and published in one volume (in 1972) under the title The Time
for Poetry.^50 They include several articles, papers read at various conferences,
as well as letters sent to other Lebanese poets, and cover the period from
1959 to 1971. They show a remarkable degree of consistency, integrity and
seriousness, indicating a mind of great subtlety and originality, and a prose
style which is at once sensitive and clear, and a gift for making challenging
and provocative statements. There is not the space here to discuss all the
main ideas in that book, but some of these ideas, particularly in the first essay,
are immediately relevant since they provide the best comment on the work
of not only the most influential single figure in Arabic poetry today, but also
of some of the Shi'r poets.
The essay is given the significant title (borrowed from the French poet Rene'
Char) 'Exploring a World Constantly in Need of Exploration', but was first
published in Shi'r magazine in 1959 under the title 'An Attempt to Define the
New Poetry'. Drawing upon such French writers as Rend Char, Andre*
Malraux, Rimbaud and Baudelaire to support his argument, Adunis begins
his essay with these words:
Perhaps the best way to define New Poetry is to say that it is a vision. By
its nature a vision is a jump outside the present concepts. It is therefore
a change in the order of things and in the way of looking at them. Thus at
first glance New Poetry appears to be a rebellion against the forms and
methods of old poetry, a rejection of its attitudes and styles which have out-
lived their usefulness (p. 9).
New Poetry expresses the eternal anxiety of man, the existential problems
