Arabic Poetry - Modern Poetry

Modern Poetry

Mention no longer the driver on his night journey and the wide striding camels, and give up talk of morning dew and ruins.
I no longer have any taste for love songs on dwellings which already went down in seas of odes.
So, too, the ghada, whose fire, fanned by the sighs of those enamored of it, cries out to the poets: "Alas for my burning!"
If a steamer leaves with my friends on sea or land, why should I direct my complaints to the camels?

—Excerpt from Francis Marrash's Mashhad al-ahwal (1870), translated by Shmuel Moreh.

Beginning in the 19th and early 20th centuries, as part of what is now called the renaissance or al-Nahda, poets like Francis Marrash, Ahmad Shawqi and Hafiz Ibrahim began to explore the possibility of developing the classical poetic forms. Some of these neoclassical poets were acquainted with Western literature, but mostly continued to write in classical forms, while others, denouncing blind imitation of classical poetry and its recurring themes, sought inspiration from French or English romanticism.

A common theme in much of the new poetry was the use of the ghazal or love poem in praise of the poet's homeland. This was manifested either as a nationalism for the newly emerging nation states of the region or in a wider sense as an Arab nationalism emphasising the unity of all Arab people. The poems of praise (madih), and the lampoon (hija) also returned. Ahmed Shawqi produced several works praising the reforming Turkish leader Kemal Atatürk, but when Atatürk abolished the caliphate Shawqi was not slow in attacking him in verse. Political views in poetry were often more unwelcome in the 20th century than they had been in the 7th, and several poets faced censorship or, in the case of Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayyati, exile.

After World War II there was a largely unsuccessful movement by several poets to write poems in shi'r hurr or free verse. Most of these experiments were abandoned in favour of prose poetry, of which the first examples in modern Arabic literature are to be found in the writings of Francis Marrash, and of which one of two of the most influential proponents were Nazik al-Malaika and Iman Mersal. The development of modernist poetry also influenced poetry in Arabic.