A Critical Introduction to Modern Arabic Poetry

(Greg DeLong) #1
BARUDI 19

my heart, which drove me to raise my voice with poetry or to chant it in
order to obtain solace for my soul.
Here Barudi expresses a principle which sets him apart from his immediate
predecessors and which proved to be an all important principle in modern
Arabic poetry: namely, that a poet should write only in obedience to an inner
urge, and not in order to attain worldly gain. Indeed, the history of Arabic
poetry since the Abbasids is not devoid of poets who did not prostitute their
talents. But this should not belittle the significance of Barudi's revolutionary
stand. For here is an implied condemnation of the long tradition of the 'genre'
of panegyric, in which the poet does not give expression to his true feelings.
And in fact, despite his traditionalism, Barudi wrote no more than a handful
of panegyrics, and even these do not entirely conceal the poet's own convic-
tions and attitudes. Likewise, despite his deep awareness of the importance
of mastering the technique and craft of poetry,^12 Barudi emphasizes, as a
corollary to his insistence on the principle of inner compulsion, the element
of spontaneity. Here again we find a feature of his work which distinguishes
it from the bookish and artificial creations of the philologicaUy-trained Yaziji,
although, of course, we do not find in Barudi the degree of the 'spontaneous
overflow of powerful feeling' which we shall later encounter in the work of
the romantics. Time and time again in the preface we find him drawing the
reader's attention to the need for sincerity, truth, nature and spontaneity.
The best poetry, he says, is that which is not only marked by 'the harmony
of words' and 'brilliance of ideas', or which is at once clear and profound,
but which is also 'free from the taint of artificiality'. He quotes approvingly
that 'poetry is the quintessence of a man's mind' and that 'the best verse you
can utter is that of which, when you recite it, people will say "how true".'


The preface in fact gives a clear indication of the middle position Barudi
holds between the old and the new. Despite the essential modernity of some
of the principles enunciated — the need for sincerity, spontaneity and the
engagement of the whole of the poet's personality in the creative process —
the terms in which they are formulated, indeed the very language of the
whole preface, are traditional in the extreme. Significantly enough, he opens
it with a long passage expressing his religious piety, the traditional pious
preamble to medieval works.
The traditional aspect of Barudi's work, his conscious return to the classic-
ism of the past literary heritage of the Arabs, reveals itself in a number of
ways. Mention has already been made of the anthology he compiled from the
works of thirty poets beginning with the Abbasid Bashshar, which was
published posthumously in four large volumes under the title Mukhtarat al-
BdrudJ in 1909. In his own poems he deals with the main themes of classical

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