THE PRB-ROMANTICS 72obligations which he had to carry out, and are therefore not to be given too
much importance in an impartial appraisal of the poet's achievement. He
himself clearly distinguished between them (together with similar political
and social poems such as his multiple eulogies and elegies) and his more
serious productions.^11 In the latter the tone of the poetry is very much more
subdued and less declamatory or harsh than that of the poetry of either
Shauqi or Hafiz. We shall see later on how the followers of Mutran went a
step further in their belief in the primacy of meaning: they sought an even
greater freedom and independence in their desire for self-expression. Inspired
by their master, who claimed (in the same preface) that he had written his
poetry in order to relieve his soul in solitude, they gave an even freer expres-
sion to their personal emotions.
Thirdly, Mutran regards the 'uncommonness of the imagination and the
strangeness of the subject' as essential qualities, which he tried to realize
in his poetry. These qualities, which constitute very significant departures in
the history of Arabic poetry, are very far from the tendency to keep the con-
ventional themes, the conventional poetic diction and therefore the con-
ventional poetic vision of the neoclassicists. We are now very close to the
originality and creative imagination which were the watchwords of the
European Romantics. Although there are no proofs of a direct or even an in-
direct debt to Wordsworth or Coleridge, there is definitely an interesting
parallelism between Mutran's insistence on uncommonness of imagination,
or strangeness of subject, together with essential truthfulness, minuteness
and accuracy of description, and the avowed intentions of the authors of the
Lyrical Ballads. To those who criticized his poetry by calling it 'modern'
Mutran replied in the preface, somewhat defiantly: "Yes, indeed it is modern
and it is proud of being modem. It has the same advantage over past poetry
as that which modem times have over our past ages'. And he adds, 'I claim
without fear that this new style of poetry — and by that I do not simply mean
my own weak compositions — is the poetry of the future, because it is the
poetry of Me, truth and imagination all at once'. In this no doubt Mutran's
confident prophecy came true. Abu Shadi pointed out how easy it was for
most of Mutran's disciples to forget the big role he had played.^12
Writing of the contents of his first solume of verse Mutran says in his
preface:
Most of the poetry here is nothing but tears which I have shed, sighs I have
uttered and fragments of my life which I have squandered away, but by
turning them into verse it seemed to me as if I had been able to recapture
them.