EPILOGUE 264concors. The ideal of clarity which remained of paramount importance in the
classical Arabic critical tradition^7 is the very ideal which the Cartesian spirit
brought about in French and English neoclassicism. This is not to mention
stylistic features in neoclassical poetry like the use of rhetoric and poetic dic-
tion in English Augustan verse, the neat balance and antithesis of the heroic
couplet, with its meticulously placed caesura and its pronounced rhyme
designed to emphasize the sense which is supposed to end with the end of the
couplet — features to which one can find many parallels in classical Arabic
poetry, if one cares to look for them.
The two hypotheses which, according to von Grunebaum, underlie
medieval Arabic literature, namely the comparatively low place assigned
to imagination^8 and the view of form as something external, to be 'somewhat
arbitrarily joined to content',^9 are in fact true also of western neoclassical
poetry. Furthermore, classicism, with its stress on polish and good form,
should be seen as an expression of a fairly stable culture in which there is com-
mon agreement on fundamental issues, while romanticism is the product of
society at odds with itself and in which the individual questions the validity
and relevance of traditional values. What could be more natural, then, than
that the individual Arab poets should, at this juncture in their history, turn
to this literature of revolt?
That the Arabs turned to western Romantic poetry first need not therefore
surprise us. Apart from other considerations, they would not have been
capable of taking much interest in the subsequent or avant-garde poetic
movements, because in many ways these were further developments of the
Romantic experience and they presupposed it. The Arabs had to assimilate
fully the Romantic experience first, both on the psychological and on the lan-
guage levels. Once they had done so subsequent movements became possible,
and with each successive movement the gap became increasingly narrower,
so much so that the young Arab poet of today has access to nearly as much
international poetry (mainly in translation, of course), almost immediately,
as his English-speaking counterpart.
Fortunately in matters of poetry the gap does not have the same signifi-
cance as in matters of technology. Although romantic poetry was not the
poetry of the western world in the twentieth century and poems like
Mikha'il Nu'aima's 'Friend',^10 Shabbi's 'New Morrow'^11 or Iliya Abu Madi's
'Evening'" could not have been produced in the West at that time, the value
and significance of such poems remain unimpaired. Unlike technology,
poetry is not superseded — poetry, that is, which is the expression of a genuine
human experience in words that exploit to the full the possibilities of a par-
ticular language. The heightened sense ofindividuality, the agonizing feeling