Elements of Folktales in Modern Arabic Poetry—The First Half of the 20th Century

Abstract

The emergence of free verse poetry in the mid-twentieth century opened the doors for various cultural elements and literary genres to interact with poetry. Enjambment, breaking the boundaries of verse, and flexibility with meter and rhyme brought poetry closer to familiar prose forms and provided more space for the idea, image, and scene, enabling the poet to transform his poetry into drama easily. The Arab poet needed to produce liberal texts freed from old restrictions using language with which people are familiar and addressing social issues in a simple way; but this trend may cause artistic aspects to be neglected and turn the text into standard daily speech with no artistic features. However, modern poets were able to overcome this problem by employing the dramatic style in their poetry, using the folktale. The folktale links the reader directly to the artistic work and, at the same time, conceals the poet’s direct emotions and acts as an objective correlative preserving poetry’s allusive language and style. The first examples in which Arab poets in the modern era employed folk storytelling techniques are found in al-Sayyāb’s and ʿAbd al-Ṣabūr’s works, after which the presence of folktales in Arabic poetry became more pronounced. Herein lies the importance of this study as it reveals the early indications of this emerging trend, which would be a harbinger of the works of future Arab poets.