A Critical Introduction to Modern Arabic Poetry

NEOCLASSICISM 16

or its author's creative imagination.^4 Yet Yaziji's contribution was by no
means negligible. He managed to purify the language ofpoetry of muchof
the artificiality and absurd or hyperbolical accretions of the past centuries
of decadence. At his hands the language ofpoetry recaptured something of
the classic simplicity, tautness and the forceful rhetoric of Abbasid poetry,
especially the poetry of Mutanabbi, the poet he admired most. But there is
nothing in Yaziji's work that suggests even remotely that it was written in
the nineteenth century. In spite of his competence and verbal skill Yaziji
must be regarded as basically an imitative poet, drawing upon the traditional
imagery of the desert. There are one or two poems, like his elegy on his dead
son,^5 which do express some personal emotion, but by far the main bulk
of his work is far too literary or bookish, relying too much upon the work
of the past and is fatally divorced from whatever concrete, living experiences
the poet may have had. He still tends to indulge in too many verbal tricks
and chronograms and much of his poetry deals with trivial social occasions.^6
The historian of modern Arabic literature must, therefore, give more space
to his prose than to his poetry, and even in the former, as in his collection
of maqamat (Majma' al-Bahrairi), his contribution is also more negative than
positive, when compared with a remarkable creative prose writer like al-
Shidyaq.

Barudi

Unlike Yaziji, Mahmud Sami al-Barudi (1839-1904) managed to combine a
return to the purity of diction, the forceful expression and the classicism of
the Abbasids with the ability to express his own individual experience often,
though by no means always, in terms of the environment in which he actually
lived. Likewise, he differs considerably from his Egyptian contemporaries
or immediate predecessors in that at his best he produced works which are
free from artificiality, and in which there is a direct expression of an earnest
mind and an impressive personality. That is why Arab critics and historians
of literature are generally agreed that it is with al-Barudi that the renaissance
of modern Arabic poetry truly begins.

Barudi is often referred to in Arabic as rabbu'l saif wa'l qalam (master of
the sword and the pen) because he distinguished himself both as a soldier
and as a poet. In the imagination of the Egyptian reader a certain glamour
surrounds his person; he is the Sir Philip Sidney of the modern Arabic
renaissance, the all-round figure who is a soldier, courtier and scholar in
one. Descended of an old Circassian family, he was educated first privately
at home, then in one of the modem military schools first introduced by
Muhammad Ali.^7 On his graduation as an army officer in 1855 he left for