THE DIWAN GROUP 87Writing of this group of poets, one of them, 'Aqqad, says the following in
his well-known book Egyptian Poets and their Environment in the Last Genera-
tion. The passage is important and is quoted at length.
The generation which appeared after Shauqi were not in the least influenced
by him, either in their language, or in the spirit of their poetry... They read
directly the Diwans of the ancients, studied them and admired in their
style whatever they found agreeable ... Were it not for the similarity of
their general attitude, these modem poets would have differed widely the
one from the other as a result of the stylistic differences between their
favourite poets, who were as distinct one from another as Mutanabbi was
from Ma'arri, Ibn al-Rumi, al-Sharif al-Radiyy, Ibn Hamdls or Ibn Zaidun.
As it was, they only differed in their opinions on detail and in the manner
of expressing them, but they were all agreed on the conception of poetry
and the criteria of criticism ...
As regards the spirit of their poetry, the younger generation ... were
widely read in English literature. In this respect they differed much from the
writers who appeared towards the end of the past century, and whose
reading in western literature was confined to certain limited aspects of
French writing. Yet, despite their extensive reading in English literature,
they were by no means unaware of the works of the German, the Italian,
the Russian, the Spanish and the ancient Greek and Latin poets and prose
writers. In their reading in English literature they seem to have benefited
more from literary criticism than from poetry or other forms of literature.
I do not think it would be wrong to say that to the whole school Hazlitt
was the guide in the field of criticism, it was he who led them to a true
understanding of the meaning of poetry and other arts, to the various kinds
of writing and the aims of each kind, and to the proper use of quotation
and comparison ... In their admiration for Hazlitt then, the Egyptian
authors were not slavish imitators; what enabled them to retain their
independent judgment when approaching western literature was the fact
that they had previously (and even concurrently) been reading their own
literature; they therefore did not enter the world of western literature
blindly or without discrimination.
The truth is that the Egyptian school did not imitate English literature,
but it benefited from it and was guided by it. Further, it formed its own
opinion of each English author in accordance with its own independent
judgment, and did not mechanically adopt the estimate arrived at by the
author's countrymen.^27Then follows a list of the authors cited as a source of inspiration to Egyptian
writers, which includes the names of Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Carlyle,
Browning, Tennyson and Hardy, and the Americans Emerson, Longfellow
Poe and Whitman.
Of course, this partisan account of the whole movement given by'Aqqad,
who is one of its staunch protagonists, is hi many respects highly exaggerated.
In the first place, as the eminent Egyptian literary critic Muhammad Mandur