THE ROMANTICS 126of the flesh." The beauty created by the poet out of his imagination has be-
come a distinctly spiritual kind of beauty and the poet now makes a complete
identification between himself and a prophet.
This preoccupation with beauty may lead some to think that Abu Shadi
was a poet exclusively concerned with nature and art to the complete dis-
regard of all the pressing problems of social and political reality around
him. Nothing could be further from the truth, and it is important to emphas-
ize this aspect of Abu Shadi's work, because it has not yet received due re-
cognition. Abu Shadi's interest in social and political problems of his country
was of long standing: in a poem entitled 'Art for Art's Sake', claimed to be
written in 1912,^30 Abu Shadi writes:Should I get drunk on songs, love and fair women while tears are flowing
and my country goes hungry?
He is always lamenting the degeneration of the Arabs, the passing of
their glory and the present tyranny under which they are forced to live.^31
Although he is prone to idealize village life in contrast to the evils of a big
city as, for instance, in 'The Jewel of the Countryside'^32 which depicts
the dangers city Me holds for a naive village girl, on the whole he
cannot be accused of romanticizing the fellah in the manner Taufiq al-
Hakim did in his well-known novel Resurrection. On the contrary he wrote
about social and economic problems, and advocated the creation of co-
operative societies.^33 His poem 'At the Religious Court'^34 is a graphic de-
scription which would do credit to the most committed social realist. He
depicts the law court as a market place where people's conscience and
dignity are bought and sold, where women appear as humiliated victims,
lawyers' agents awesome figures and the whole place resounds with shouting
and screaming and the utterance of false oaths. It swarms with miserable-
looking and deprived children, their faces covered in flies and the bread they
eat laid over with a thick layer of dirt. Mothers sit suckling their babies
with breasts wrinkled and thin from hunger and suffering. The court of law is
called the house of women's lamentations: women go there hoping for a re-
dress to their just grievances and for a meagre sustenance to be granted them
but they only receive scoldings and false accusations: 'They look like
shrouded ghosts but to their shrouds the whole world is blind.' In his most
mature volume. From the Heavens Abu Shadi's awareness of the social and
political problems of his country grew much keener, and it gradually became
so overwhelming that he was finally driven to self-imposed exile. The poem
that gives its title to the volume,^35 written in 1942, affirms once and for all
Abu Shadi's commitment to the 'Earth' and to its cares and problems. 'The