tenets and the modern appropriation of classical prosody, as manifested in her
Mdmbarticles which made up her later book on criticism.^96 Her concerns were
with acquainting readers with the movement, before battling her counter-
parts whom she deemed irresponsible for their total defiance of tradition.^97
Adnnls, on the other hand, led the movement beyond this impasse. Taking
advantage of the dismay among the literati at the growing political jargon
among the leftists, he brought into poetry a new spirit that was responding
to change through an understanding of tradition as a name for diversity.
Although negotiating his poetics with care, he nevertheless invited attacks
and criticism from associates and opponents.
Although poets of the 1950s shared an agenda for modernity and innovation,
their positions regarding tradition were not uniform. Al-Sayymb’s criticism
was directed against the shmcir al-khaymbah al-kilmslkiyyah, the poet of classi-
cal oratory, meaning his mentor and patron al-Jawmhirl (1903–1996).^98
Al-Baymtllooked upon tradition as a mixture of everything, to be selectively
used. Even predecessors like al-Mutanabblwere reduced categorically to
beggars and panegyrists on the one hand, and rebels and dissidents on the
other.^99 His Mutanabblis the one who leaves behind that outworn self, his
“shoes,” to be up to the challenge, which he sets in his poems of revolt.
Regarding Adnnls, there is an incomplete process of modernity and renewal
in tradition, which invites a further shift beyond fixity in forms and values.
One is tempted to analyze the poet’s position in view of some pronounce-
ments by Baudelaire. The latter says, “Modernity is the transitory, the fugi-
tive, the contingent, the half of art, of which the other half is the eternal and
the immutable.”^100 Adnnls built on the modernity constant in his theory of
dialectical exchange and struggle. His framework for a nexus of modernity
and tradition elicited JabrmIbrmhlm Jabrm’s criticism at the Rome Conference,
for Jabrmargued that modernism needs no historical context.^101 As an active
member among the literati of the period with great attachment to the west-
ernization of literature, Jabrm developed a method of reasoning that
attempted to account for change in the educated class consciousness. The
attempt at historical accentuations for modernity bothered him, and he was
stronger whenever western poetics was the yardstick. Well-acquainted as he
was with Anglo-American literature, he was perhaps aware of Laura Riding’s
and Robert Graves’ Survey of Modernist Poetry(1927), in which they argue for
true modernism, as an aesthetically forward movement, with “... faith in the
immediate, the new doings of poems (or poets and poetry) as not necessarily
derived from history.”^102 In a later essay, Jabrmarticulates his early argument
with Adnnls in terms of Freudian competitiveness, garbed in neo-historical
terms, for the poet “... would have to compete with the great names of the
past if he had anything worthwhile to say,” he contends, repeating with
emphasis Eliot’s pronouncements in this respect.^103 Nevertheless, Jabrmwas also
attuned to the Eliotesque method of reasoning in respect to his understanding
of his own Western tradition. Jabrmdrew attention to the sensibility emerging
THE TRADITION/MODERNITY NEXUS