of scholasticism in which dictionary learning tended to be of superior urgency
to private visions.”^65 In contrast, modern poetics makes selective use of the
salient features of classical poetics, manipulating as method, among others,^66
Eliot’s objectifications of experience, and his extensive and timely use of the
non-literary, the mythological, and the classical. Poetic texts are a space for
a dynamic dialogue, and the modern poem in the hands of its masterly
producers universalizes the moment through active engagement with the
local and the traditional. It may be an address to the educated and the elite,
but its negotiatory intertext gives it great potential to effect cultural change.
Although translation at large was taken very seriously throughout the
1950s and 1960s, poets were involved in the effort not only in response to
their strong precursors’ practice, but also because of textual pertinence.
Hence, translations from Eliot deserve attention, as their timely appearance
helped in directing poetry toward a non-romantic stance, an objectification
of experience that suited the pose of the poet as a public intellectual. Eliot
says in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “Poetry is not a turning loose
of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personal-
ity, but an escape from personality.”^67 The significance of this objectification
process lies in its challenge to the more popular romanticism. As employed
by William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot, this depersonalization
brought into Arabic poetry new practices, which were subtle enough to elude
restrictions and strictures, and also to cultivate taste beyond romantic senti-
mentalism.^68 Behind these, a distance is maintained and an oblique view is
developed. The past becomes an active moment of present implications.
Tradition for the modern Arab poet is no longer a static structure fossilized
and contained by the dominating group. In the same essay, which was popu-
lar in the early 1950s, Eliot insists on this grounding in heritage to develop
a dynamic and effective poetics. He addresses issues of originality and
uniqueness in terms of this grounding in tradition and knowledge of one’s
literature and culture. The more the poet knows of heritage, the better qual-
ified he or she is to be original and unique, “the most individual parts of [the
poet’s]work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their
immortality most vigorously.”^69 One’s poetry derives originality and signifi-
cance according to its place in one’s culture and tradition, among forebears
and ancestors, “[the poet’s]significance, his appreciation is the appreciation
of his relation to the dead poets and artists” (Ibid. 72). The view gains further
emphases in Eliot’s “The Function of Criticism,” for the literatures of a country
or a continent are “organic wholes” or “systems in relation to which, and only in
relation to which, individual works of individual artists, have their signifi-
cance.”^70 No wonder many Arab poets launched a systematic reading of heritage,
with a view to find better affiliations and more intimate ancestry. Translated
early in the 1950s, both articles operated positively on the literary consciousness,
leading to an increasing interest in Middle Eastern mythology, classical poets,
and poetics. While inciting the anger of the “old-school gentlemen” who
THE TRADITION/MODERNITY NEXUS