Mahjar poets in North and Latin America, those who had access to other
cultures, and brought into poetry a new sense of poetic usage and imagery,
like Mikhm’ll Nu‘aymah (1988), Gibrmn Khalll Gibrmn (d. 1931), I ̄liyymAbn
Mm,l(1890–1957), and Naslb ‘Arl,ah (1887–1946). Significantly, Gibrmn
Khalll Gibrmn influenced poetic language profoundly, for instance, and has
been an impact beyond historical and cultural limits. He may be the right
bridge to understand the modern impulse in Arabic poetry, not only because
of his exposure to American transcendentalism and European Romanticism,
but also because of his deep engagement with the ethics, values, and canons
that make up a large portion of Arab cultural tradition. Living across cultures
and traditions, he has liberated language from artificiality and let words
speak with no metrical restrictions. This is a basic achievement, not only for
its immediacy, but also for its recovery of Arabic from the grandiosity and
superfluity that accompany dying aristocracies. In other words, in Gibrmn
Khalll Gibrmn’s writing as well as in the emerging postclassical and romantic
impulse, there is a recovery, not a revival, along with a dialogue with tradi-
tion and interaction with the Western and Afro-Asian cultures. Recovery in
this instance means confrontation with the real in its present manifestations,
including cultural decadence and servile imitation. As a position or an attitude,
it debates a tradition which we usually dump as neoclassical.
A major question that may face students of Arabic poetry relates perhaps
to the transformation and change within a single poetic sensibility. For how
does a person leave one’s grounding behind and develop a new modernist
temperament? Like grounding in the Latin tradition, initiation into the
ancient Arabic tradition and its later accommodation in the nineteenth
century may well empower one’s poetic language when the poet is receptive
to changes in taste, and is open to experience. Otherwise, poetry may end up
as servile imitation of a bygone model.
The Tammnzlmovement and the modernity–tradition issueIn Arabic poetics, tradition is even more inclusive, as modern consciousness
stretches it beyond the Islamic period to embrace the legacies of the
Sumerians, Babylonians, Phoenicians, and ancient Egyptians. To use current
criticism, modern consciousness counterbalances its negative categories of
ennui and alienation by a “conciliatory gleam” as derived from antiquity and
the mythical past.^49 In modern Arabic poetry, the passage of this past into the
present is not a smooth one, as evidenced by the 1964 collapse and disinte-
gration of the Tammnzlmovement of the 1950s. This movement took its
name from the Babylonian deity Tammnz, “... the youthful spouse or lover
of Ishtar, the great mother goddess, the embodiment of the reproductive
energies of nature,” as James Frazer explains in The Golden Bough, a book that
was adopted then by a significant number of Arab poets.^50 The similarity
between the Arab scene since the late 1940s and the European one of the
POETIC TRAJECTORIES: CRITICAL INTRODUCTION