cosmopolitan, the ascetic and the exuberant, the realist and the dreamer, the
Jayknr child and the citizen of the world, a point that is laughingly hinted at by
Unslal->mjj.^4 In him, we find the Arab Romantics along with Shelley, Byron,
Keats, Wordsworth, and Eliot. Afraid of too close an association with the Shi’r
group,^5 he cited Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” for Ynsuf al-Khml
(letter of May 4, 1958, Rasm’il, Letters 130), suggesting the combination of
modernism and tradition as a way out of the Shi’rimpasse. Politically, he stood
for “popular literature” as anticolonial, as his letter of June 19, 1954 to Suhayl
Idrls shows (Ibid. 108). Long before that (October 26, 1942), he wrote to the
Iraqi dramatist Khmlid al-Shawwmf approving of his advice to follow strong pre-
cursors such as al-Mutanabbl, al-Macarrl, AbnTammmm, al-Bu.turl, Shawql,
and al-Ruxmfl(Letters 30). He was able to read his immediate precursors or con-
temporaries such as AllM. Ymhmand Ma.mnd >asan Ismm‘ll because their books
were available, not the dlwmnsof the others (Ibid. 30). Al-Sayymb was also
haunted by temporality like many Iraqis, who, perhaps due to an ancient tradi-
tion, are caught between memory and space, with all the implications of anxi-
ety, fear, joy, prosperity, and hunger, superbly brought together in his paradoxical
“Canticle of the Rain.” Al- Sayymb’s belonging to this “inventory” of traces estab-
lishes a firm ground for his popularity and lasting influence. While open to non-
Arab readers, his known poems, with their agitation, music, wit, pleasant
reasoning, and local color, are also typically Iraqi. Indeed, here lies the difference
between the two, al-Sayymb and al-Baymtl. The latter managed to subsume shreds
and images into his poetry while devising a poetic space that opts for universal-
ity. The wailing and agonized voice of the rover, the exile, and the forlorn could
fit into any scene, especially when the textual homeland builds its inventory
through dialogue with other exilic texts. This dexterity eludes the search for plain
reference and direct borrowing and compels the reader to accept his texts as uni-
versalized witnesses to an age of dislocation, exile, and dissent with conspicuous
markers of hollowness, ennui, mechanicality, and death of love. The case is more
so as the poet merged the mythical method with patching from other sources.
This took place while he was exploiting everyday speech and scenes of common
life. In this practice, al-Baymtlis closer to Eliot than al-Sayymb is.
In 1955, I.smn ‘Abbms noticed these similarities between al-Baymtland Eliot,
emphasizing the pictorial quality, the use of common speech not traditional
poetic lexicons, and stylistic and structural patching in order to depict
the emptiness and sterility of the modern scene.^6 Both used the non-poetic, the
common, and the ordinary in such a way as to render it poetic, to implicate
modern life in its contradictions and signs of failure. Yet, their concept of frag-
mentation and sterility is applied differently, for in Eliot’s case the urban site is
the ruptured and fissured one, while for the Iraqi poet, until the early 1960s,
there is a rural site that draws the same response.^7 More than any modern poet
in Arabic literature, al-Baymtlfigures as the ephebe and the master, the practi-
tioner and the pioneer, the realist and the Sufi, the rebel and the mythmaker.
Throwing himself at an early stage into unrestrained experimentation, he offers
THE EDGE OF RECOGNITION AND REJECTION