BARUDI 17Constantinople, where he occupied a post in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
and perfected his Turkish and learnt Persian. When Isma'il became viceroy
in 1863 Barudi was one of his favourites: in 1865 he sent him to help suppress
the revolt in Crete and also to the Russo-Turkish wars in 1877, where he did
well and was rewarded with the title of Major-General. Isma'il appointed
him governor of the Sharqiyya province, then of Cairo. Under Taufiq he
reached the high position of Minister of Education and waqf in 1879, and in
1882 he headed the 'Urabi revolutionary cabinet from which he resigned in
protest against the Khedive's interference in government shortly before the
British occupation of Egypt. Because of his involvement with the unsuccessful
'Urabi rebellion he was tried and exiled to Ceylon, where he spent seventeen
years. During his exile both his daughter and his wife died, and he nearly
lost his eyesight. He was allowed to return to Egypt only in 1900, when he
was already a wreck, four years before his death.
This very brief account of the main happenings in Barudi's very eventful
life is of some importance in the study of his poetry, for he used events of his
life as material for his poems to a remarkable degree. He was an exceedingly
ambitious man, to the extent that some people think he secretly aspired to
the throne of Egypt.^8 He was also very proud: he knew his own worth and
never tired of making a point of displaying his own merits. His poems are full
of descriptions of the various battles in which he fought and of the different
landscapes in the countries he visited in the course of his wide travels. Like-
wise, many of his poems deal with the great vicissitudes of his life, with the
extreme changes of fortune he underwent from the pleasures of great power
and authority to the humiliation of defeat. Much of his poetry is inspired by
the sorrows of exile, the homesickness and the longing for scenes and places
in an idealized Egypt.
Barudi's works, his Diwan, not all of which, unfortunately, have so far
been published, appeared posthumously in 1915. Before his death, however,
he had written a preface to his Diwan, which is a critical document of great
importance. It sheds much light on his poetry and helps explain why he
occupies a crucial position in the development of modem Arabic poetry.
What strikes us in the preface is, in the first place, the serious view of poetry
which Barudi expresses in it. Far from being a frivolous entertainment or a
mere intellectual exercise, poetry is regarded as a serious art with a serious
aim. His definition of it is diametrically opposed to the purely formal defini-
tion, which had been current for so long, namely that it is 'rhyming metrical
speech'. For the first time in modern Arabic we have a poet who is fully aware
of the engagement of the whole personality in the creative process and of
the living effect poetry has upon the reader. Poetry, he says, is