NEOCLASSICISM 28cannot be said that the most successful of committed' neoclassical poems are
in any meaningful sense a mere copy or pale reflection of classical poems.
The distinguished Egyptian writer Yahya Haqql clearly realized this when,
in his interesting essay on Shauqi's elegies he recently wrote: 'Shauqi is a
modern extension of the tribal poet in his golden age'.^23 This role of spokes-
man of the community was, of course, not confined to Shauqi, although
because of his greater poetic gifts he obviously excelled in it and took great
pride in it: he said, for instance:
My poetry was the song in the joys of the east,
And the comfort in its sorrows.^24All the neoclassicists, in one way or another, played this role with such
frequency and seriousness that they had a lasting effect upon the later devel-
opment of Arabic poetry: in a sense modern Arabic poetry has never been
entirely free from social or political commitment. But the resounding phrase,
the oratorical tone, the rhetorical magniloquence and grand style, the pro-
nounced and almost incantatory rhythm, and the clinching rhyme of the
qasida style rendered it a perfect form for this 'public' type of poetry. Poems of
this type have once been likened to leading articles: they may indeed have
fulfilled similar functions for a while, but they do much more besides, and at
its best this is journalism of the very highest order - the order of Dean Swift's
A Modest Proposal or similar tracts. And because it is poetry that relies heavily
upon the peculiar formal features of the language, unlike journalism (and, of
course, unlike much later poetry) it is bound to lose a great deal in translation.
Moreover, because the neoclassical poets used the language of statement at
its highest potency, and were masters of rhetoric and the art of persuasion,
they were on the whole more successful in their political and social poetry
which took the form of direct address to the reader than in their short nar-
rative poems (favoured by Zahawi and Rusafi) which related stories designed
to point an obvious moral connected with a political or social problem.
Finally, although the neoclassical form and style were eminently suited for
public themes, where the poet was constantly aware of the presence of an
audience to exhort or instruct, or to derive comfort and reassurance from —
and it is no accident that neoclassical poetry was recited or declaimed at
public gatherings and that its effect was greatest when read aloud — the figure
of the poet in communion with his own thoughts has not been entirely absent
from neoclassicism. Poets like Barudi and Shauqi were able to express some-
thing of their inner thoughts and feelings within the framework of conven-
tion, in fact by putting the conventions themselves to their own personal
use.2s yet, despite the fact that in a man like Zahawi self-preoccupation can