us texts of enormous value for students of comparative literature. They are
intertextual terrains of intense negotiations and divided loyalties. Charmed by
T. S. Eliot’s method of recollection, dialogue, and engagement with tradition
and modernity in the Waste Land, al-Baymtldevoted enormous attention to
the American poet, but with the reservations of the early Marxist, the quasi-
nationalist, and the Sufi of a later time. He was no less attracted to Lorca,
Hikmet, Neruda, and many others, along with al-Ma‘arrl.^8 Al-Baymtlis both a
representative of the modernist engagement and a liberal in literary tradition.
As a Marxist but with national dreams, he was opposed to exploitation,
dictatorship, and imperialism. He invaded Eliot’s images of decay and failure,
but he manipulated the mythical element to fit into his early pronouncements
of hope. Strongly drawn to Luwls ‘Awa,’s critique of Eliot, his separation
between Eliot’s poetics and his visions, al-Baymtldedicated a poem to Eliot in
his collection Kalimmt lm-tamnt(Undying Words). Eliot is reactionary here, and
al-Baymtlcalls on him to attend to a human scene of rapture and change:
There are men
Waiting
Burning
To lighten earthly cities
To sing for freedom.^9Eliot is strangely collapsed into the image of the Arab precursor al-Macarrl
once, for the latter was also called on in “Maw‘id flal-Ma‘arrah” (Rendezvous
at al-Ma‘arrah 1957), to leave behind his self-imposed isolation and siege, and
join the revolutionary celebration of change.
Al-Baymtlstood against whatever dehumanizes and endangers the human
race. Eliot reappears in every stage of al-Baymtl’s life, never outgrown, to meet
the Iraqi poet’s focused pronouncements. Like his fellow poets of the 1950s
and the 1960s, al-Baymtlfully participated in enhancing a radical shift toward
national awareness, emphasizing throughout the desire for transformation and
change. While Marxism made him too politically conscious to sustain a
poetics of allusion in his early poetry, his unrestrained immersion in experi-
mentation enabled him to capture the spirit of the age. Not surprisingly, he
also made use of Middle Eastern mythology, Judaeo-Christian symbolism,
and Anglo-American, Spanish, Turkish and Persian sources. Sufism and
mythology work beautifully together in his poetry whenever Virgilian
vegetation myths blend with Christian mythology and mystical tradition. The
aspiration for change passes through gates of death and rebirth. Liminality
becomes the in-between space of rituals and anxieties before incarnation:
We were lovers pursued and cursed
Between two fires and two worlds
Suffering the exile in the in-between world.^10THE EDGE OF RECOGNITION AND REJECTION