SHAUQI 31Although he was more directly exposed to western influences than many
poets of the romantic school were to be later on, Shauqi was essentially a
neoclassicist. It is true that during his sojourn in France he became acquainted
with French poetry, but his reading was not confined to the romantics, for
beside Hugo, de Musset and Lamartine he also read La Fontaine who inspired
him to write a number of fables of his own. Shauqi also translated Lamartine's
•he Lac into Arabic verse, though the translation is lost. What is even more
significant for the development of modern Arabic literature is that, while
he was in France his interest in the theatre was born and he wrote the first
serious modem Arabic poetic drama, which is directly indebted to French
example. Yet, in spite of this formal indebtedness to the west, Shauqi
remained profoundly a neoclassicist; he may have borrowed the external
form of western literature, but for his language and for his inspiration
he was an Arab revivalist, turning back to the past poetic achievements
of the Arabs. No doubt, in the last analysis, the felicity of his memorable
phrases, the sonority of his music and his use of language at its highest
potency were the product of his great poetic gift, which rendered his handling
of the Arabic language so sensitive and masterly, but at the same time
these would not have been possible without a thorough education and train-
ing in the Arabic classics. One of the main sources where he could read
numerous specimens of the best in the old Arabic poetic tradition, together
with the best of Barudi, was the philological-cum-rhetorical-cum-critical
study called al-WasUa al-Adabiyya (The Literary Apparatus) written by the
celebrated Sheikh Husain al-Marsafi towards the end of the nineteenth
century. And when he was a student in France Mutanabbi's poems were
apparently his constant companion.^30 Some of Shauqi's best-known poems
are deliberate imitations of works by Arabic poets of the past — in the way
Pope, for instance, imitated Horace or Johnson imitated Juvenal. He imitated
al-Buhturi (n,54)^31 , Abu Tammam (i,61) al-Mutanabbi (m,146), al-Ma'arri
(III,55,1O3), al-BusIri (i,36) and al-Husri (n,152), among others. He also wrote
a variation on Avicenna's Ode on the Soul thereby setting an example which
was to be followed by other succeeding poets (II,71). After his exile in Spain
he fell under the spell of Spanish Arabic poetry, which is clearly reflected
in his felicitous creative imitations of Ibn Zaidun (n, 127,162) and Ibn Sahl
(u,214).^32
Shauqi's traditionalism shows in other ways. In a poem on al-Azhar (i, 177)
he writes:
Do not follow a bewitched band.
Who find hateful all things old.
Not only does Shauqi liken himself to Abu Tammam, eulogizing al-Mu'tasim
in his panegyric on the Khedive of Egypt (II,94), but he often resorts to the