EXPERIMENTS IN FORM 227ing to one moderate poet, might well become the form of the future).^45 The
prose poem Qasidat al-nathr which is related to, but not identical with, free
verse (in Arabic shi'r manthur: prose poetry) is a form connected with the
names of the Lebanese UnsI al-Hajj, whose writings are exclusively in this
form, and of Adunis and Yusuf al-Khal who make occasional use of it. Free
verse has been in existence in modem Arabic since the beginning of the cen-
tury and we have seen how Mutran composed an elegy on Ibrahim al-Yaziji
in this form. Born under the influence of western poetry, particularly that of
Walt Whitman, it was used by Amin Rihani and more successfully by Jibran
and Mayy Ziyada (1895—1941). As the name indicates, free verse does not
adhere to any of the traditional metres, nor does it follow any regular pattern
whatsoever, though it may heavily rely upon euphony, rhythm, imagery and
occasionally rhyme. Ever since the beginning of the century (and particularly
during the 1930s when the movement of Arabic translations of European
poetry gathered momentum), free verse has been a popular medium par-
ticularly with highly westernized Arab intellectuals. In Egypt Muhammad
Munir Ramzi (1925—1945) (whose works, alas, still remain unpublished)
wrote in this form poems of an unusual emotional intensity which reveal an
exquisite sensibility of a profoundly romantic nature.^46 For obvious reasons
(related partly to the fact that its authors claimed to be writing under the in-
fluence of the unconscious mind, partly to a revolt against the Arab heritage)
free verse was also used by the writers of surrealist poetry in Egypt, such as
Jurj Hunain, and the Syrians Urkhan Muyassar and 'Ali al-Nasir in their
volume Siryal (Aleppo, 1947). Similarly, Albeit Adlb (b. 1908), the editor of
the well-known Lebanese periodical al-Adib (1942— ), published a whole
volume of free verse entitled Litnan (For Whom) in Cairo in 1952. The most
significant users of free verse in the postwar period are the Palestinian Jabra
Ibrahim Jabra (b. 1926) (who has been living in Iraq since 1948 and who has
exercised a seminal influence on major Iraqi poets such as Sayyab), Tauffq
Sayigh (1924-1971) and the Syrian Muhammad al-Maghut (b. 1934). Jabra
has published two volumes: Tammiiz in the City (1959) and The Closed Circuit
(1964), and Sayigh produced three: Thirty Poems(\954), The Poem K (1960)
and Taufiq Sayigh Ode (1963), while al-Maghut has brought out Grief in Moon-
light (1959), A Room with a Million Walk (1964) and Joy is not My Profession
(1970). It would be pointless to try to give here in translation examples of
what these poets were trying to achieve in this respect, though we may later
on refer to their work in our discussion of other, non-formal aspects of modern
Arabic poetry.^47
Unlike free verse the prose poem appears on the page as prose, and is
generally divided not into lines but paragraphs. Whereas free verse starts