dialogue with, Dante’s Beatrice or Eliot’s Lady in White in “Ash Wednesday”
(1930). The presence that is not different from ‘M’ishah resists personalization
to sustain instead the image of forgiveness, succor, and love:
Because of the goodness of this Lady
And because of her loveliness, and because
She honors the Virgin in meditation
We shine with brightness.
(Pt. II)Unlike Eliot, however, al-Baymtlnever endows his women with religious
connotations. Like Lmrmand ‘M’ishah, from among his women, the “lady of
the seven moons” is yearned for as the source of poetry. Estrangement from
her means misery and gloom. In a word, separation is exile. In tune with
Ibn ‘Arabl’s address to his beloved al-Nizmm, nicknamed “The Eye of the
Sun,” al-Baymtl’s female mediators also fuse into the temporal and the sub-
stantial while ostensibly leading him into some purgatorial ascent, which
without lapsing into quasi-religiosity recalls Dante’s Beatrice. What is com-
pensated for in Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” with benediction and prayer exists
in al-Baymtl’s poetry as traces of precarious existence, estrangement, and exile.
His objectified structures, their intense visualization, and rich auditory effect,
rescue his poetry from too much abstraction, a problem that Eliot had
surpassed through structural objectifications.
Tradition and the polyphonic poem
Trans-cultural preoccupations as the common ground for modernism should
not be overlooked, however. Whenever there is an engagement with a subtext
shared by all, but which also goes beyond Eurocentricism, mutual under-
standing and exchange become certain. George Steiner’s critique of Pound
and Eliot for deviation from a “matchless tradition” in the Cantosand The
Waste Land, their appropriation of “Oriental thought,”^17 attests to a common
register that has been criticized and condemned by the upholders of a
Western canon. In “The Tradition,” Pound articulates his justification for
modernity in relation to tradition as follows: “The two great lyric traditions
which most concern us are that of the Melic poets and that of Provence.”^18
He adds, “From the first arose practically all the poetry of the ‘ancient world’,
from the second practically all that of the modern.” Counteracting claims
of some other originary past, Pound opens up criticism for prospective
readings and pleasant joy. To al-Baymtl, as to many among his generation,
these prospects enrich poetry and poetics. No wonder the Andalusian
presence of Lorca and the faith of the Turkish Nazim Hikmet fuse into a
subtext of Sufi poetry and Islamic belonging, along with methods and
articulations from modernity at large. In this respect, Badawi is right in
THE EDGE OF RECOGNITION AND REJECTION