NEOCLASSICISM 50were firmly fixed in the literary past. His intellectualism bears in fact a close
affinity to that of a poet like al-Ma'arri whose influence on him was deep and
of whom he regarded himself as a disciple.^62 Zahawi's poetry contains echoes
from well-known works by classical poets such as Mutanabbi, Ma'arri and
others.^63 One still encounters conventional imagery and forced conceits in his
work, particularly in his elegies.^64 His 'imitations' of classical Arabic poets
have been amply illustrated by at least one scholar^65 and the essentially
classical character of his language has been pointed out by another.^When,
under the influence of some of his contemporaries outside Iraq, he tried to
revolutionize his forms by doing without rhyme altogether, the result was a
complete failure.^67 Besides, in most of his poetry, and especially in his many
narrative poems, he always took care to point a moral. As for his numerous
quatrains, which add up to more than one thousand written professedly in
imitation of 'Umar al-Khayyam,^68 and in which he wrote on almost every
topic under the sun, from scientific fact to philosophic speculation, Zahawi's
didacticism is only too palpable. That his successful poems are limited to
those cast in the traditional mould, and that there is in his poetry a hard core
of morality and didacticism, and that his language is that of explicit statement
in which the power of suggestion is reduced to a minimum—all these factors
point to a sensibility which is basically neoclassical. And it is significant that
in his most successful long poem, the so-called epic Revolt in Hell which runs
into 434 lines and which represents one of the peaks of his creative activity,
he chose the traditional form which observes one metre and one single rhyme
throughout.
The case of Zahawi, however, is complicated by some of his critical utter-
ances which may suggest that in his actual poetry he advocated complete
poetic freedom or that he believed in relative and not absolute standards. For
instance, in his introduction to the 1924 Cairo edition of his Diwan, he says,
'I cannot see that there are any rules for poetry, since poetry is above all
rules... A poet is allowed to write in any metre he likes, irrespective of
whether or not it is one of the metres codified by al-KhalO.' Again, in the
preface to his selection of his own poetry, The Essence (1928), he wrote that
'the "New" in poetry is that which is soaked in modem consciousness'. Yet, as
we have already indicated, when we look at Zahawi's own poetry we find
that he wrote nothing which from the point of view of versification, al-Khalil
would have found objectionable, let alone revolutionary, and the poetry
which Zahawi calls al-shi'r cd-mursal in which he dispenses with rhyme seems
to cry out for rhyme. Towards the advocates of western poetic values Zahawi's
attitude is rather reactionary and traditional. Likewise, his words about the
different means of excellence in ancient and modem poetry may suggest that