been keen on creating an independent Iraqi state since 1919 when he
established >aras al-Istiqlml (Guardians of independence) as a society in
illah (Babylon).^24 There were many like him all over the Arab world, as any
survey of political and literary trends indicates.^25
The common denominator among liberal poets and some belated revivalists
throughout the first half of the twentieth century is pointedly anticolonialist,
and recalls a glorious past to indict the present. When he was a Lieutenant
under the command of the British Lord Kitchner in Sudan, the Egyptian poet
mfizIbrmhlm (d. 1932) wrote a poetic address to his people in 1872 that
recalls the classical poet AbnTammmm (d. 846). To consolidate an anticolo-
nialist poetic among those “Who swore a mighty oath ye would not rest / until
this land holds not a soul oppressed,” a lineage should be established between
the addresser and the forebear: “What boots the Muse of melody and song, /
What the sweet minstrel, noblest of his throng / Than whom AbnTammmm
piped not more clear...?”^26 The reclamation of poetic ancestors is always
present in his poetry for a purpose, for “O Nile! The time of sleep is past and
done. / While Egypt slumbers; within Egypt’s shores / Stirs an awakening.”^27
The poet, whom his contemporaries described as one who “portrays an entire
age in the life of the Egyptian people,”^28 recalls the past as one of glory that
cannot be revived without a struggle for freedom:
Ask of Baghdad, ‘Didst thou a rival own
When men’s religion was Islam alone?’
Virtue had not through ease to softness grown,
And knowledge crowned a claimed supremacy.^29With its combination of pride in a past of great struggle and achievement and
disappointment at a present, this rhetoric is neither confined to the revival-
ists nor is its reclamation of the past restricted to literary tradition. The
romanticists of the Apollo poetic school in Egypt in the early 1930s went
even further, to the ancient Egyptian history, where “Ramses sits on his high
throne,”^30 albeit with a sumptuous Keatsian imagery and detail, as the case
was with A.mad ZaklAbnShmdl(d. 1955), the influential member of the
Apollo school. Yet, while the early revivalists urge change and revolt through
rhetoric and the reclamation of a literary ancestry, the Apollo group roman-
ticizes the call through an appeal to heroes of change and revolt, as one
of Khalll Muyrmn’s (d. 1949) poems shows, “Ye are a folk whose chronicles
abound / With noble deeds, since valor was renowned,” including “Great
generals, and dauntless soldiery,” wise “governors” and “scholars profound,
who shed true learning’s light / On human hearts, to guide mankind aright.”
Such cataloguing might not have been the domain of poetry had it not
been for his intervening poetic of fear and danger that builds up in the
poem through a Shelleyan aesthetic of powerful natural imagery and human
aspiration, “ ‘Now is the hour of peril come,’ I said, / ‘That shall awake them!
POETIC TRAJECTORIES: CRITICAL INTRODUCTION