THE CONTEMPORARY POETS 259ness or modernity. The term has become an emotionally charged one: the cult
of the 'New' has never been so widespread as it is now. 'The only thing the
New poets have in common is their intention to innovate', wrote one
enthusiastic critic.^80 That modernity or newness (al-hadatha) has become a
value in itself, is the source of both the strength and the weakness of this
poetry. On the one hand it has resulted in the most daring verbal construc-
tions, thus enlarging the possibilities of the language, as Jaroslav Stetkevych
has recently observed in The Modern Arabic literary Language.^9 * But this
obsessive concern with newness also argues a disturbing insecurity and
lack of self-confidence, for by newness the poets really understand similarity
with the West. So anxious are they to become international that they stand
in danger of working against the genius of the Arabic language. For instance,
when in the early 1960s Maghut wrote about 'blue clouds of chestnut',
'the hissing of wild breasts', the sea 'bidding him farewell with a chesty
smoker's cough', 'eagles' tears piling up like silt' and 'wild words hang-
ing down from trees like figs', or the fingers of his dead friends and kins-
men 'embedded like thorns in the wind', or when Taufiq Sayigh des-
cribed 'radiant negation growing dark', — the sensitive and enlightened
reader might have regarded this as an interesting and valuable extension
of the poetic image, an effective device if used in moderation.^82 But in
the 1970s such language would neither surprise nor shock, but would be
looked upon as the common idiom of poetry. It is as if a poem consisted
of an unbroken chain of paradoxes and non sequiturs, so far has Arabic poetry
travelled on the road of irrationality. As can be seen from the special issue
of Adab devoted to Modern Arabic Poetry (March 1966), many voices from
Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq have already been raised deploring this obscurity
and the accompanying violence done to the Arabic language, and not
all of these voices were those of Marxists — such as Husain Muruwwa who
understandably objected to Arabic poetry becoming dissociated from the
realities of the Arab situation and identified with the inner world of dreams.
But, of course, it cannot be said that the dangers inherent in obscurity have
been averted, and the fear is that if this present tendency continues unchecked
serious poetry will become just as irrelevant, or at least as marginal in the
Arab world as to some extent it has become in the West.
What is the image of the poet that emerges from this poetry? It is that of the
hero, the saviour and the redeemer. We have seen how the craftsman has
given place to the spokesman of society in neoclassicism, how in pre-
romanticism the spokesman has been replaced by the man of sensibility who
is above society, and in romanticism he has become the seer, the prophet.