note, M. M. Badawi explains these movements in their relation to the
classical past with its many schools and attitudes. He argues:
[T]he poets’ attitude to their past poetic heritage could be regarded
as a reliable indicator of their degree of modernism. As is to be
expected, different stages in the development of modern Arabic
poetry were accompanied by related changes in the attitude to the
past indigenous tradition.^33As an example he cites how “the forerunner of neoclassicism, al-Bmrndl,
compiled a huge and influential anthology of Arabic poetry of the past, which
was largely confined to the poetry of the Abbmsid era, the very poetry the neo-
classicists regarded as their model.”^34 Then he compares this taste with “the
pre-Romantics of the Dlwmn School” who “favored those Abbasid poets noted
for their individuality or emotionalism, such as Ibn al-Rnml, ‘Abbms Ibn
al-A.naf, and al-Ma‘arrl.” He finds the Romantics of the Apollo school in the
1930s and 1940s much attuned to poetry “which celebrated the world of the
senses and intense emotion such as the poetry of love, wine, and mysticism.
Unlike the Tunisian Abnal-Qmsim al-Shmbbl(d. 1934), who was obviously
an extreme case in criticizing tradition in general, they searched the tradition
for precisely those qualities which they wished to realize in their own poetry.”
As for the modernists, who were centered around the Free Verse Movement
and experimented freely with the prose poem since the 1950s,^35 he thinks of
Adnnls as “the most celebrated example of reappraisal of the past heritage,”
for not only did he compile an “idiosyncratic anthology of Arabic poetry of
the past,” but he was also the author of “a massive, searching, and provocative
historical study of classical Islamic culture...The Constant and the Changing,
published in 1974.” In this study, adds Badawi, Adnnls emphasizes “the value
of the intellectual rebel or dissident, the prototype of the twentieth-century
Arabic modernist.”^36
A word of caution is pertinent at this stage. Under the pressing need for
innovation and the imperatives of an appeasing critique that claims mod-
ernism as a constant in Arabic literary tradition, Adnnls collapses innovation
in artistry with radical politics of transformation at times. He is right in
drawing attention to innovation as a practice among the mu.dathnn, or the
“moderns” of the classical tradition, and as advocates of change from the pre-
Islamic poem, but this should not be confused with dissent. The innovative
stance in poetry, usually associated with Muslim Ibn al-Walld (d. 208 H/
823 AD) and AbnTammmm (d. 231/845), has a number of facets and cannot
be cited wholesale as a transformational landmark. On the political level, Abn
Tammmm was never sympathetic to marginalized communities aspiring for
change and justice. Nor was al-Bu.turl(d. 284 H/897 AD) for that matter.^37
On the other hand, their taste for artifice is also a double-bind, for it
emanates from the recognition of competitiveness in a commodity age
POETIC TRAJECTORIES: CRITICAL INTRODUCTION