EPILOGUE 263Marinetti, but his own poetry shows only a mild form of romanticism. It is a
sobering thought indeed that the Greek poet Cavafy wasproducing his power-
ful 'modem' poetry in Alexandria, to all intents and purposes unbeknown to
the Arab poets who were busy writing romantic poetry at the time. Abu Shadi
lived in England at a time when the most exciting experiments in modem
English poetry, the experiments of Pound and Eliot, were taking place, yet
his interest lay chiefly in English Romantic and Victorian poetry. Similarly,
with the exception of one or two (Egyptians), Arab poets turned to the poetry
of T. S. Eliot in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when it was already beginning
to look old-fashioned, having in the meantime been succeeded by the work of
the generations of Auden and of Philip Larkin. In fact, to the informed reader
the excitement of discovery which was felt by many Arab poets and critics
in the 1950s in the work of Eliot seemed somewhat naive and certainly pro-
vincial. The case of socialist realism provides another example, although the
gap here is only that between the generation of the Spanish Civil War and
the post-war generation.
This apparently disturbing observation gives rise to two not unrelated
questions. First, What is the significance of this gap? Secondly, What is the
extent of originality in modern Arabic poetry? There are many reasons, I
think, why the Arabs turned to the Romantics when they first encountered
western poetry. The obvious one is that at that time the popular taste in
Europe was still formed on Romantic ideas and ideals, and it would be grossly
unfair, if not unrealistic, to expect a complete foreigner to a culture to acquire
more than the popular taste where an extremely complex cultural product
like poetry is concerned. Second, Romantic poetry presents fewer difficulties
than the classical which relies upon the peculiar rhetorical features of a lan-
guage, particularly its formal features. (How many native English speakers
can really appreciate Racine?) Because Romantic poetry is more spontaneous
and emotional its appeal is proportionally more immediate. like the Arabs,
the Japanese, for instance, translated or adapted Shelley when they first met
English poetry.* Third, while there may be 'romantic' elements in the Arab
poetic heritage which would facilitate the appreciation of western Romantic
poetry, the traditional Arabic conception of literature shares many of the fun-
damental assumptions of European classicism, with the result that, when the
desire to break with their past and enter the modern world was genuinely
felt, Arab poets found in European Romanticism, which was professedly anti-
classical, the assumptions and ideals which seemed to them to fulfil ade-
quately their own needs. Al-Amidi's criticism of Abu Tammam's poetry for
its unfamiliar and far-fetched metaphors^6 is strongly reminiscent of Johnson's
famous criticism of the 'metaphysical' poets, where he attacks their discordia