MUTRAN 71moved abruptly from one theme or part of his poem to another. Even more
significantly, those Arab critics who consciously evolved theories of literature
were not concerned with this question of structural unity of the whole poem.
At best, all they were concerned with was the unity of the paragraph. This is
true even of the great medieval critic 'Abdul Qahir al-Jurjam.^7 Among the
neoclassical poets we have been considering there was not one who was
fully aware of the need to impose a structural unity upon individual works —
although of course sometimes by a kind of artistic instinct they managed to
attain unity in their poems. Even Zahawi, in some ways the most articulate
of them on the nature of poetry, did not consider the question of the structural
unity of the poem to be of any importance. On the contrary, he believed that
digressing and moving from one theme to another in the same work was
more consonant with the nature of consciousness.^8 And when he came to
collect what he regarded as the best of his own poetry in the volume called
The Essence, he cut out large portions of his poems without apparently feeling
any significant loss.
Mutran, on the other hand, systematically and deliberately sought to
achieve unity of structure. His poems, including his narrative poems, seem to
have a clear pattern, a beginning, a middle and an end — a fact noted by the
Egyptian critic Muhammad Mandur when he came to discuss Mutran's
earliest narrative poem with which the first volume of his Collected Works
opens.^9 We shall see later on how the alleged absence of this type of unity
from most of Shauqi's poems became a major target for the severely adverse
criticism written by the younger generation of poets like al-'Aqqad.
The second important concept developed by Mutran is the primacy of
meaning^10 , expressed in the poet's description of himself as not being 'a
slave to his verse or to the necessities of rhyme or metre'. While not neglect-
ing the language of his poetry, or even the traditional metres and rhymes,
Mutran is never guilty of mere verbiage, or pursuing high-sounding words
or figures of speech for their own sake. The significant development in this
was of the poet rising at long last above the rhetorical temptations which are
almost inherent in the very nature of most traditional Arabic poetry since
the later Abbasid period, and to which the neo-classicists certainly suc-
cumbed. Of course, many of Mutran's poems, especially most of the contents
of the three later volumes, deal with such social occasions as greetings to
friends or congratulations on weddings, etc. But although at some point we
shall have to face squarely the question why Mutran does not seem to have
developed much beyond the first volume, it is important to emphasize at this
stage that these poems do not really represent the poet in any meaningful
sense. They are not evenjeux d'esprit, but are more of the nature of social