NEOCLASSICISM 32idiom and imagery of traditional Arabic poetry. For instance, in his poem
entitled 'The Chief Events in the History of the Nile Valley' which he com-
posed on the occasion of the Conference of Orientalists held in Geneva in
1894 (i, 17) we find that the boat on a rough sea is described (albeit effectively
and vividly) in terms of Arabic desert poetry: hope attending on the boat
in the manner of a camel driver singing to his camel. The clamour of the sea
is likened to that of 'horses' in the thick of battle, waves surging and piling
upon one another resemble 'rocks' in a desert; the movement of ships rising
and falling on the crest of waves is likened to that of camels in a caravan.
In a poem dealing, among other things, with the problem of food shortage
after the First World War (1,66), he begins with an apostrophe to the ruins
of encampment, much after the manner of a pre-Islamic poet. He is also
capable of opening a political poem dealing with an issue affecting the future
independence of the country, entitled 'The Milner Plan' (i,74), with a nasib,
an amatory prelude of no less than seventeen lines couched in purely con-
ventional phraseology in which women are referred to as wild cows and
gazelles, their slim figures as willow branches, their heavy buttocks as sand
hillocks, their eyes as narcissi, and so forth. Shauqi shares the medieval
Arabic view that Arabic is the most beautiful language in the world (t 130)
and explains, in a poem addressed to the eminent Syro-American author
Amin Rlhanl (U35), that America has produced no good poetry to match
her technological achievements. In fact Shauqi's traditionalism and his
tendency to follow the classical models of the past are so pronounced that
Taha Husain at one point described him and the rest of the neoclassicists
as mere revivalists, and al-'Aqqad accused him of being no more than an
accomplished craftsman.^33 While this is certainly true of some of Shauqi's
slavishly imitative poetry, such statements are far from the truth if they
are regarded as considered judgments on the entire work of the poet.
Shauqi used the old idiom to express strictly modem and contemporary
social, cultural and political concerns. The subjects he tackled in his poetry
cover almost every aspect of public Me in Egypt, and much of what was
happening to the Arab and Ottoman worlds. Of the four volumes comprising
his collected works, dl-Shauqiyyat, the whole of volume i is, as we have seen,
devoted to political, social and historical themes, while volume m is taken
up by the elegies composed mainly on public figures, and much of the
posthumous volume iv is also about social and political current issues. He
wrote to welcome Cromer's departure from Egypt (i,206), to rejoice at
Ottoman military victory (i,61 ;33O), to lament the waning of Ottoman glory
and military defeat (i,277), to note the ending of the Caliphate by Mustafa
Kamal 0,114), to commemorate the patriotism of Muhammad Farid