ZAHAWI 49further volumes appeared posthumously, Last Drops, published by his widow
in 1939, and finally the daring and revolutionary Evil Promptings which was
rescued from oblivion and published by Hilal'Naji in 1963 in his painstaking
study of the poet.^59 Zahawi was fond of revising his own poetry and republish-
ing it in subsequent collections with the result that, as in the case of the
contemporary American poet Robert Lowell, editing the canon is a task
which presents formidable problems.
Zahawi reacted very strongly against the artificiality and affectation of
much of previous Iraqi poetry, its mental sterility and its blind imitation of
past models. His revolutionary views on poetry and society shocked his
contemporaries in Iraq, yet he was later hailed as the father of modern Iraqi
poetry. In 1922, when Zahawi was in his late forties, we find an Iraqi critic
like Butti claiming that he was still regarded by the rising generation as their
supreme poet. Zahawi's fame, however, seerris to have suffered something of
an eclipse in his own country after his death.^60
Like Barudi, Zahawi managed to rid the Arabic poetry of his country of the
associations of frivolous verbal tricks which had clustered round it in the past.
Perhaps more than any other poet of his generation Zahawi wrote about the
importance of poetry and the seriousness of the poet's function. In his Diwan
(1924) he devotes a whole section (pp. 240—62) to his compositions on poetry
and poets. One manifestation of his belief in the seriousness of poetry is his
attempt to eschew all forms of badi', the false conceits and exaggerated figures
of speech in which many of his predecessors indulged, and his systematic
adherence to what he calls the principle of the simplicity of language,
which he claims in one of his poems he was the first to declare.^61 'The best
poetry', he says in one poem, 'is that which interprets the heart and its
sorrows' (p. 247). In another he writes, 'in poetry lying is not sweet and
deceit is not permissible' (p. 250), thereby rejecting by implication the
popular medieval Arabic view that 'the sweetest poetry is that which feigns
most'. Like Barudi, too, but with a much greater freedom, he brought Arabic
poetry to bear upon modern life. He turned away from the mechanical
imitations of the ancient poetry of the Arabs — the weeping over ruins,
the deserted encampments of the beloved, the description of desert life — in
favour of his own immediate experiences, whether social, political or intel-
lectual. Furthermore he had a feeling for nature and wrote many poems
describing in loving detail various aspects of spring and autumn, sunrise
and sunset, birds and particularly the night sky. Of all the neoclassical
poets Zahawi was perhaps the most desirous of change, and was not averse to
experimenting in new forms; yet he cannot really be called a pre-romantic,
let alone a romantic, because, in spite of his so-called 'modernism', his roots