Modern Arap Edebiyatında İlk “Serbest Şiir” Deneyimleri

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewBlank Verse: A Guide to Its History and Use. Robert B. Shaw . Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007. Pp. xi+305.William H. PritchardWilliam H. PritchardAmherst College Search for more articles by this author Amherst CollegePDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreSeventy years ago, in his provocative essay “Is Verse a Dying Technique?” Edmund Wilson argued that, increasingly, post-Flaubertian prose fiction had taken over many of the “poetic” qualities that once were only found in verse. Speaking as a twentieth-century modern man, he asserted rather grandly that there was no verse technique “more obsolete than blank verse”: “The old iambic pentameters have no longer any relation whatever to the tempo and language of our lives. Yeats was the last who could write them, and he only because he inhabited, in Ireland and in imagination, a grandiose anachronistic world. You cannot deal with contemporary events in an idiom which was already growing trite in Tennyson's and Browning's day” (The Triple Thinkers [New York: Oxford University Press, 1948], 26–27). Wilson stuck his neck out with this pronouncement and seemed unaware that in his time, poets like Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, whether or not they were dealing with “contemporary events” (whatever those might be), had produced blank verse of outstanding quality. And there would be more to come in the century's second half, as Robert B. Shaw demonstrates in this altogether welcome survey of the subject.Mr. Shaw has surprisingly few predecessors in the field: he cites a book of three essays by John Addington Symonds, Blank Verse (New York: Scribner, 1895), and George Saintsbury's massive three-volume A History of English Prosody (London: Macmillan, 1906–10). A century later, the most recent edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1993) assures us that the advent of free verse sounded the death knell of blank verse, but, with reference to the familiar words of Mark Twain, Shaw thinks that rumors of its death have been exaggerated. His preface invites us to try out the numerous passages of verse by saying them aloud in order to discern “the key to [their] movement”: “Readers of this book will be on the right track if they find themselves vocalizing, annoying librarians and alarming passengers in neighboring seats on the subway. This is one of the more virtuous ways I can think of to get in trouble” (x). The humorous, offhand tone is welcome and comes into play again when he insists that blank verse is not a “halfway house between rhyme and open form.” Its ability to generate “a sense of ongoingness,” of “commanding momentum,” is a major virtue; we should not think of it as “a ‘lite’ version of formalist poetry; nor is it free verse in a coat and tie” (3). These impressionistic definitions of what blank verse is not are a way of suggesting what it is or can be.Shaw's technique of scansion is minimal and flexible (he often provides alternate ways a line could be scanned), consisting of “x” for an unstressed syllable, “/” for a stressed one, with “\” for an “intermediate” degree of stress (xi). But he knows, as does anyone with an ear, that one da-DUM is different from another da-DUM—that, in another good formulation, “not all iambs are created equal” (16). His opening chapter, “The Sounds of Blank Verse,” usefully distinguishes the form from both rhyming verse and free verse, also from prose. The last distinction is an important one since the notion is still around that blank verse is a “blood-relative” to prose (11). One recalls that when Frost published North of Boston (1914), some of his critics thought the blank verse of many of the poems “free” enough so that it was indistinguishable from prose, from conversational talk. And any teacher of college students will find many of them cheerfully calling blank verse “free verse,” while at other times speaking of blank verse as “prose.”In chapter 2, Shaw launches a fifty-page historical survey of the form, from its beginnings in the Earl of Surrey's translation of part of The Aeneid (1557) and Sackville and Norton's turgid drama, Gorboduc (1561–62). Mention of these two monuments brought back horrible memories of graduate school when I was introduced to them by the distinguished editor Hyder Rollins. To be fair to him, Rollins did not venerate these early efforts but knew they were the beginnings of what Shaw terms “part of a larger story of the rescue of poetry from [a] state of poetic anarchy” (33). Fifty years later, Shakespeare's mature blank verse gives us not just a good line or two but “verse paragraphs that sustain themselves over unpredictable spans, paradoxically challenging as well as satisfying the demands of the meter” (41). In other words, lines like these, spoken by Othello as he vows to Iago his unshakeable purpose against Desdemona:Like to the Pontic Sea,Whose icy current and compulsive courseNev'r keeps retiring ebb, but keeps due onTo the Propontic and the Hellespont,Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent paceShall nev'r look back, nev'r ebb to humble love,Till that a capable and wide revengeSwallow them up.(43)Bernard Shaw quoted this as a great example of what he called Shakespeare's word-music, and Robert Shaw notes how the extended simile and syntax give “propulsion to the onflowing of the meter” (43).His guided tour through three centuries of blank verse includes especially rewarding stops at Milton and at one of Milton's eighteenth-century successors, William Cowper, some lines from whose The Task (1785) Shaw uses to illustrate how Cowper “domesticated” his predecessor. It is the morning after a snowstorm, andThe cattle mourn in corners where the fenceScreens them, and seem half petrified to sleepIn unrecumbent sadness.(64) “The combination of ‘half petrified’ and ‘unrecumbent,’ which runs the risk of ponderousness, unexpectedly succeeds in bringing vividness to the scene. It highlights the patient stillness of animals after a hard night, standing upright and waiting to be fed” (64). Even if The Task is perhaps “too quiet and rambling” (64) for modern tastes, it can, Shaw rightly asserts, be read with pleasure the way most long poems from the eighteenth century cannot.For this reader, the most original and useful part of the survey is the two chapters on how various poets used blank verse in the first and second halves of the last century. Although the earlier period chapter is titled “Blank Verse and Modernism,” the two poets who made most distinctive use of it—Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost—worked out old-fashioned ways to be new. In their individual ways, which Shaw describes excellently in his pages on each, they were altogether more hospitable to blank verse than those who, like Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and T. S. Eliot to a degree, were concerned to disrupt or reject the form (“To break the pentameter, that was the first heave,” says Pound in one of the Cantos [122]). Eliot's claim in “Reflections on Vers Libre” (1917) was that the “constant suggestion and skillful evasion of iambic pentameter” —such as he found in Pound's “Near Perigord”—provided a way of avoiding the anarchy threatened by free verse (124). It is in “Gerontion” (1920), Shaw suggests and carefully demonstrates, that this “prosodic theory” works itself out in very calculated manipulations in and out of traditional pentameter. So in lines that are prosaically “off,” we are invited “to divine the latent possibility of iambic pentameter even as it fails to materialize” (126).That Shaw is a critic rather than merely a bland guide is emphatically shown in his pages on Wallace Stevens, the discussion of whose pentameter concludes “Blank Verse and Modernism.” In the essay “The Free-Verse Line in Stevens” (1998), the poet Donald Justice claimed that Stevens followed Eliot's suggestion of “withdrawing” from the form by loosening it with anapestic substitutions, or adding a third syllable to the two syllable basic iamb (209). But Shaw is more skeptical than was Justice as to the effects of this procedure on Stevens's later verse. He sees Stevens's growing fondness for the tercet stanza in many of his later longer poems as a form more concerned with the sentence than with the line, indeed even permitting “laxity” in the line by way of getting right the elaborate sentence. I am not aware that this observation has been made about Stevens previously. Shaw remarks, severely but sensibly, that the later Stevens “operates on the treacherous border between metrical and free verse” (160) and observes that some of his adulatory readers do not seem to note when the border has been crossed.In “After Modernism,” Shaw valiantly engages, in brief or at length, with perhaps too many poets—fifty of them by my count—from Jarrell, Lowell, and Berryman down to various contemporary practitioners in the mode, of which he himself is one. (He is, however, too modest to subject his own blank verse to analysis.) He finds that the conversational style of Lowell's unrhymed sonnets “makes meter something of an afterthought”; like Stevens's tercets, the sonnet form for Lowell amounts to “little more than a familiar box to fill” (171). Perhaps the most valuable pages in the entire book are the twenty he devotes to four poets who are “essential figures” in the blank verse of the last century's second half: Howard Nemerov, Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, and James Merrill. One thinks of their formal mastery, especially that of Wilbur and Merrill, as most apparent in the brilliance and ingenuity of their rhymed poems; in fact, their achievements in blank verse are also notable. To take only Wilbur's case, his poems in the mode are relatively few but include such masterly efforts as “The Mind-Reader,” “Walking to Sleep,” “Lying,” and (most recently) the beautiful “This Pleasing, Anxious Being.” In these poems, Shaw acutely points out, the idiom “seems not so much contemporary but timeless, attuned equally to modern and traditional properties of poetry” (189). He identifies as modern “the photographic sharpness of Wilbur's imagery” but also sees that behind much of his blank verse “the presiding genius is Milton,” though a Milton “tactfully scaled back from epic proportions to those of lyric meditation” (189). Wilbur, along with Nemerov, Hecht, and Merrill, are the most conspicuous and expert examples of blank verse's aliveness four hundred years after it began.In his final chapter, “Writing Blank Verse Today,” Shaw compares the poet in this medium to a tightrope walker who knows “how tautly stretched [the rope] is and what slight degree of give in it can be tolerated” (251). The metrical line or “sturdy rope” can support, in the hands of an expert, “steady feats of passage, colorful jugglings, unexpected pauses, even stumbles which may appear spontaneous but are carefully rehearsed” (251). At the conclusion of Blank Verse, one feels admiring gratitude to Robert B. Shaw, who has guided us with such imaginative care for a particular verse medium and also for the larger enterprise of poetry. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 108, Number 1August 2010 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/653626 Views: 621Total views on this site © 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Free verse and prose rhythms, by definition, do not have metrical organizing schemes, but does this mean that rhythm in free verse or prose poems is like speech or prose rhythm? Taking up these questions debated since the advent of modernist free verse more than one hundred years ago, this essay draws on recent critical literary and linguistic findings to formulate a new method for scanning and comparing rhythm in English-language free verse and prose genres. The comparison of six texts suggests that in poetic free verse or prose texts rhythm constructs information-rich, multilevel, context-specific semantic systems in a way that does not occur in the nonpoetic texts. These results contest persisting prosodic theories that free verse and prose poetry are largely written in prose, and suggest that rhythm is a more important generic marker of the poetic function than lineation is.

Free verse, with its unregulated lines, transcends language barriers, but its melody varies among different cultures. This study examines the adoption of free verse from the Western world into Arabic literary works, highlighting the obstacles and advancements encountered by Arab translators and poets. The study inspects the main qualities that differentiate English free verse from its Arabic counterpart. The study examines how the natural musicality of Arabic affects its treatment of free verse by analyzing the distinct functions of meter and rhyme. How does the lack of meter in English free verse contrast with the abundant rhythmic customs of Arabic poetry? The research also explores the historical background, comparing the earlier popularity of free verse in English with its later development in Arabic literature, while being aware of the traditional poetic legacy it aimed to transform. How did Arab poets combine the Western rebellious structure with the traditional Arabic poetry rhythm and rhyme? What changes did the poets make to imagery and sound devices to connect with Arab feelings and emotions? This study examines the pioneering work of Nazik Al-Mala'ika, Badr Shaker Al-Sayyab, and T. S. Eliot’s influence in shaping Arabic free verse and its impact on modern Arabic literature.

“Allegiance and Parody”: An Interview with Robert Pinsky on Stevens and Frost Laura Marris and Robert Pinsky THE FOLLOWING CONVERSATION began in Boston in May 2016 while we were working on Robert’s Massive Open Online Course “The Art of Poetry.” We continued the interview over e-mail. The transcript has been edited for clarity. Laura Marris: Robert Frost seems to have a very early presence in the lives of many Americans (and not only through memorization in high school—though people are sometimes surprised when they read “The Road Not Taken” later in life!). Do you remember the first time you read a Wallace Stevens poem? Did you have a first impression of him or of Frost? Robert Pinsky: The (then) anthologized poems of Stevens were a lot more attractive than the (then) anthologized poems of Frost. For Stevens it was “Domination of Black,” “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “The Snow Man,” and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” When I was eighteen or nineteen years old, those seemed more exciting than “The Road Not Taken,” “The Death of the Hired Man,” “Birches,” and “Mending Wall.” And I guess they still do. But in time I read “Directive,” “Provide, Provide,” “‘Out, Out—,’” “The Most of It,” and “Acquainted with the Night.” The volcanic energy of those poems made me look again at Robert Frost altogether. For me, technical mastery was part of why and how I read both poets. I had read a bit of Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats—enough to appreciate the pentameters of, say, “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm” and “An Old Man’s Winter Night.” Stevens’ blank verse and his poems in rhyme (and also those poems I later learned began in rhyme that Stevens revised out) seemed to illuminate the free verse of, say, “The Snow Man.” In Stevens’ free verse poems, the capital letters at the beginning of each line seemed to assert, this is verse, just as much as something written with end-rhyme. If anything, there’s a greater degree of difficulty in making such strong rhythms without iambic movement—far from Frost’s “playing tennis with the net down.” It’s something thrilling, difficult, supremely expressive. [End Page 65] The sentences of “To Earthward” and the sentences of “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock,” in their play with and against the rhythms of the lines, fascinated me in a similar way. Or maybe in the exact same way? L.M.: Could you tell me a little more about that fascination with a Stevens or a Frost line? Are there certain musical impulses that are unique to each of them? R.P.: Every poet, every poem, has a distinct, unique music. But if you heard a few stanzas of “Sunday Morning” and “An Old Man’s Winter Night,” from behind a closed door, so you could make out the sentence-sounds but not the words, I think you might perceive two things about that verbal music. First, that these are two different composers, and second, that these might be very great composers. I’ll risk going slightly further: in “Domination of Black” and “The Snow Man,” I hear a characteristically slow, measured, cello-like free verse. In “To Earthward” and “Provide, Provide,” I hear rapid, rippling, sometimes even pizzicato iambic verse. L.M.: Among the poems you recently collected in Singing School, you call Stevens’ poem “Madame La Fleurie” a lightning stroke, “the kind of imaginative stroke that cannot be forced or willed.” If you look at Frost’s revisions (I’m thinking of “Design,” for example), you can see a more incremental process. Where is the line between willing something and revising it? Or is this difference in process a reflection of each poet’s relationship to the formal music of their lines? R.P.: I was thinking of Stevens’ amazing conclusion, that vision of our mother Earth as “a bearded queen, wicked in her dead light.” That “bearded”! Frost’s imagination may never be that fortissimo. But dazzling in its own way: the word “embodiment” in “The Most of It,” and the swimming animal “Pushing the crumpled water up ahead.” Or, in a different way, the word...

Stevens' Mixed-Breed Versifying and His Adaptations of Blank-Verse Practice Natalie Gerber The prosody of Wallace Stevens has long intrigued scholars. Unlike many of his contemporaries who famously composed their poetry entirely in meter (Robert Frost and E. A. Robinson), or vehemently eschewed rhyme and meter in favor of free verse (William Carlos Williams), or elected some alternate form of measure (Marianne Moore), or alternated periods of both practices (T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound), Stevens conveys his receptivity to what he terms both measure and free verse, provided each has any "aesthetic impulse back of it" (Letter to Ferdinand Reyher, 13 May 1921). He also frequently wrote both metrical and free-verse poems throughout his career. At times, the form of the one comments upon the other. Yet, as frequently, the two forms function more simply as different modes suited to different purposes. In his late verse, whose metricality has been questioned, we see a quasi-blank verse that is described as a nearly "free-verse line" and one that has elicited interest but not, to my knowledge, a theoretical description. In this article, I will propose one way in which Stevens' experiments with the two verse practices merge together and one way in which his late blank-verse line might serve as an unlikely bridge to what we think of as conventional free-verse lines. Before coming to the late blank verse, though, I want to look back to Stevens' earliest expressive positioning of iambic pentameter verse as a vehicle for poetry. I. Stevens' Early Verse: A Complicated "Plot" Staking New Territory for American Verse The oddly paired poems "Earthy Anecdote" and "Invective Against Swans" with which Harmonium opens provide a fascinating instance of Stevens' self-conscious use of poetic form. The first poem in particular has elicited a range of readings. Why Stevens, who as we know was particular about the order of poems in a volume, might choose such intransigent texts to begin his first book is a question well worth contemplating. In his article "Intentionality as Sensuality in Harmonium," Charles Altieri has [End Page 188] offered remarkable possibilities, clarifying Stevens' resistance in these poems to presenting an "organizing narrative or the corollary figure of an expressive agent exploring how its psyche adapts to a range of dramatic situations" (166) as part of a "challenge in American poetry to conventional ways of thinking about lyric speech" (172). Here I would like to highlight how Stevens' conscious counterpoint of prosodic methods might also contribute to conversations about the structure of the opening sequence. As Stevens sets himself two tasks—to write the great poem of the earth and to carve out a space for American poetry—positioning these two poems to open Harmonium seems a determined gesture to fashion a new American poetry distinct from its European heritage, but at arm's length and mindful of it. The two texts, as Eleanor Cook astutely points out in her Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens, have distinctive meters and more: "In contrast to 'Earthy Anecdote,' ['Invective Against Swans'] uses couplets in regular iambic pentameter, some rhyme, imitative older syntax . . . , i.e., it is an old-style poem" (31). Indeed, the former poem's use of an energetic short free-verse line that is shaped syntactically counterpoints the latter poem's use of iambic pentameter and occasional rhyme to forge couplets from longer lines and syntactic units that draw out and perhaps sedate the sense. I want to suggest that the distinctions go even further. As I have profitably taught undergraduates, the two poems can be counterpointed on nearly every point, whether or not Stevens intended such a careful counterpoint at the time of composing the respective poems (a question I will return to later): against the silent swans, emblems of an outmoded poeticism associated with European poets from Orlando Gibbons to W. B. Yeats, Stevens counterpoints the firecat, the mysterious animal whose energetic bristling and leaping answer the imagined "bland motions" of the birds (CPP 4). Where the latter poem's lines are imagined as vertical descents—motions that decayed from Zeus's "impregnating shower of gold" (Cook 31) into the crows' parodic anointing of statues with...

Four Poems Vladislav Khodasevich Translated from the Russian by Alex Cigale Arguably "next in line" after the Russian "Big Four" A (Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, and Akhmatova), the poet and critic Vladislav Khodasevich (1886–1939) has been, by comparison, neglected. The recent Selected Poems, translated by Peter Daniels, while receiving attention in The Guardian, has garnered not a single mention in the American press. As is often the case, I found the strength of these translations, by a British poet, to be their formal elegance, if at times, I think, too regular for the American ear. My purpose, then, is to remedy some imprecision in the translations available of his "prosy sections." I believe that the Russian originals of these blank-verse poems constitute the strongest possible argument for a mastery that undermines Robert Frost's argument against "playing with the net down." To the contrary, just as with a reading of the originals, my experience of translating these was particularly rich in the pleasures of practicing the tools of the poetic craft. I will go so far as to claim for them the title of a towering achievement, and not only for the formal contribution they make to the development of Russian verse (arguable only because to this day free verse retains in Russian an aura of illegitimacy, and Khodasevich himself has had few, if any, self-proclaimed followers). The crowning achievement of every major Russian poet, it seems to me, has been a dramatic identification of one's highly personal fate with that of Russia entire. That is, as a document, the work succeeds in capturing its historical moment in time. [End Page 233] Just so, what we have before us (speaking thematically), is Khodasevich's own testimony to the shattered certainties of the old world, its shell-shocked survivors stumbling about literally and existentially naked in the ruins of their formerly high culture, in the wake of the Russian Revolution (the poems date to 1918–1919). A poet whose only professed influence was Pushkin, Khodasevich here suddenly "abandons form" (though not really), as though poetic words have failed him, and temporarily adopts a looser, spoken line. One must recall that Russian poetry hasn't its own Whitman or Pound, so that the latter's prescriptions are alien to Russian culture and verse ("To use the language of common speech"; "express . . . individuality of a poet . . . better in free verse"; "compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not the metronome.") Khodasevich almost abandons form, but never quite. Always present in these is a tension between prose and verse rhythm, and the lines of "free verse," constantly pulsing between tetramer and hexameter, resolve always into blank verse. What I have found in working to reproduce these effects in English is that the directly spoken plain word and phrase require one to weigh more and not less closely each and every word, for its shadings of texture, connotation, and association. In addition to the usual complement of the tools of the poet's trade—added attention to assonance and consonance (alliteration)—there is also the more delicate sense of a well-shaped and balanced phrase, with its subtle shadings of tone, even permitting one an occasional syntactic inversion that is strictly verboten in contemporary English, to indicate elevation and emphasis, the heightened contrast between direct description and the occasional embellishment of metaphor and symbol, these occasional echoes and repetition of certain notes, to drive home "the theme." It would be intriguing to hypothesize, just one example, whether it was partially Khodasevich's own work as a translator of Polish poetry (Khodasevich's father was Polish and, incidentally, Mandelstam was [End Page 234] Polish-born) that provided him with a model. While much remains to be said to attempt to explain what makes Khodasevich both stand out and not fit in with the main body of Russian poetry, it is his synthesis of the classic and the modern, the intense personalism of his lyrical ego, the directness of his voice and address often verging on simplicity that mark his primary individuality as a poet. The naked vulnerability of such words raises the bar by exposing the relative perfection and imperfection of every...

A tradução do verso branco épico usualmente toma duas formas: fidelidade formal à contagem silábica como recriação do pentâmetro em decassílabos ou fidelidade semântica como transposição adaptativa em versos livres. Ambos os modos causam detrimento aos efeitos particulares da forma original por não transporem à língua de chegada as qualidades essenciais do verso branco inglês: o ritmo cadenciado e constante e a tensão entre o ritmo métrico e o ritmo sintático-semântico. Em nosso artigo, buscamos estudar as qualidades e efeitos que tornam o verso branco épico distinto de outras formas métricas, explorando os mecanismos do pentâmetro iâmbico, seus limites e mutações dentro da tradição inglesa, e como esse verso opera em composições não-rimadas de caráter narrativo e meditativo, nas quais as diferenças entre prosa e poesia tornam-se mais tênues e a métrica toma um caráter ao mesmo tempo menos marcado e mais fundamental. Após esse levantamento, propomos uma nova variação do verso branco em português, o dodecassílabo misto, composto de ritmo iâmbico, formado pela alternância de sílabas átonas e tônicas ou subtônicas, e dodecasílabos acéfalos quando o verso precedente é grave. Ilustramos nosso estudo do verso branco com passagens de The Prelude, de William Wordsworth, e traduzimos trechos da mesma obra segundo nossa medida métrica para determinar sua eficácia. Como resultado, notamos que nossa forma adaptada mostra-se capaz de acomodar aquelas qualidades consideradas essenciais ao verso branco, reformulando, em português, efeitos poéticos frequentemente perdidos no processo de versão de obras inglesas, como o ritmo regular binário e o momento de leitura vertido de um verso a outro de modo integrado. Concluímos, dessa maneira, que uma abordagem não-tradicional das potencialidades métricas da língua portuguesa, em diálogo com os moldes da poesia inglesa, é capaz de abrir novas perspectivas tradutórias para pesquisadores em língua portuguesa e trazer a lume qualidades de tradições métricas distintas que podem oferecer novas ferramentas a seus tradutores.

Arabic poetry is the heart of all types of literature in all Arabic realms. Consistent with this generalization, it can be right that the development of poetry in the modern age, among Arabs, is a positive measure. At that argument, the same would be focused on modern Saudi literature since it is typically considered a central, authoritative, and undivided part of Arabic poetry. In this paper, the researcher has attempted to illustrate some literary aspects of modern Arabic poetry in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as an instance of the greatness of Arabic poetry with a particular reference to a contemporary Saudi poet. The study starts with an introduction to the condition of poetry in Arabia. In the first section of the study, the researcher points up the importance of Arabic poetry as an Arabic literature genre. The second section deals with poetry and literary movement in Saudi Arabia as the central section of the investigation. After that, the task moves ahead to deal with a model of the modern Arabic poetry in the kingdom, Mohammad Hasan Awwad, a modernized rebellious poet with stark poetry, then the researcher, analytically and critically, sheds light on some selected verses of one of the poems of Awwad, Night and Me. The study finishes with a discussion and a brief conclusion. Keywords: Arabic literature, Arabic poetry, free verse, greatness, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, modernism.

The chapter examines the rhythms of prose poetry, which are different from those found in metered verse, and vary, too, from the rhythms of free verse. The main differences relate to what has sometimes been understood as a deficiency in prose poetry — namely, that prose poets do not have meter or the poetic line when they try to achieve effects of cadence or musicality. But because of the English language's grammatical flexibility, these resources allow for an almost infinite rhythmic variety in prose poems. Such variety is a crucial part of the prose poetry tradition, notwithstanding the deliberately fractured rhythms or flat tonality of some works. William Wordsworth wrote lineated poetry, but in expressing a view that prose and poetry ought to be written in the same kind of language, and in repudiating what he understood to be “poetic diction,” Wordsworth opened the way for English-language poets to explicitly recognize the connections between poetry and prose. In other words, he helped to lay the ground not only for English-language free verse but for English-language prose poetry, too.

This chapter outlines the theoretical and practical issues involved in compiling and analyzing the translation histories of literary classics from a socio-historical perspective. Starting from an overview of the theoretical framework (distant reading and sociological theory), I then move on to the practicalities of how and where to locate translations, both online and in print. Subsequently, I focus on one case study, namely Dante’s Divine Comedy, and analyzse its translation history. I give concrete data about the worldwide reception of this work – when and in which languages it was translated (and where it wasn’t was not translated) –- and then address specifically its translations into English. I show how often it was translated into specific forms – such as terza rima, blank verse, and free verse – and I additionally present examples of when it was censured in translation (in both Arabic and English). I address three other aspects of translation history as well: the nationalities of translators (focusing especially on the difference between UK and USA translators),; the age of translators;, and the gender of translators. I demonstrate that the vast majority of English translators of Dante’s Divine Comedy are male translators, even to the present day.

"The Rain Song" is considered one of the most notable poems of modern Arabic poetry in general and of B. S. Al Sayyab in particular. It is a landmark in the history of modern Arabic poetry. The present paper aims at unearthing the seeds of T. S. Eliot in Al Sayyab's poem ''The Rain Song''. Eliot is a literary figure who reshaped the literary scene not only in England, but also in the world. Accordingly, the present paper has ploughed the soil of the poem ''The Rain Song'' to discover some scattered Eliotic seeds. Modernism affected Arabic poetry early in the first half of the twentieth century. As a translator and a poet, Al Sayyab is able to delve into English poetry which becomes a catalyst that has infused him to modernize the Arabic poem. Unmistakably, Al Sayyab does not copy the Eliotic techniques of modernism. He has blended them to create something new and creative based upon the Arabic heritage. This study concludes that the free verse, mythical, imagist, symbolic, and allusive methods are the Eliotic seeds implanted in ''The Rain Song''. Such new techniques were not used in the classical Arabic poetry. Some examples of these seeds and fingerprints, in ''The Rain Song'', are presented in this study.

Shi'r al-'āmmiyya was not just an extension of the long tradition of writing popular poetry in spoken Egyptian Arabic. Rather, it was part of the movement that has brought about the most drastic changes in Arabic poetry since the formation of the canon during the seventh and eighth centuries. Canonical Arabic literature and scholarship had reserved the term shi'r for poetry written in a particular structure, that of the classical Arabic qaṣīda (ode), and in a particular language, the loftiest level of classical Arabic. During the first half of the twentieth century, Arab poets experimented with slight variations in both of these features, but it was not until the 1950s that new movements made the real breakthrough and divorced the notion of the poetic from the dictates of a particular form or language. The first movement was one that had originated in Iraq in 1948. By the beginning of the 1950s, poets who referred to their poetry as ḥadīth, "modern" or "modernist," were shaping the future for Arabic poetry. Modernist poets broke away from the conventions of structure in Arabic poetry, and adopted a much more liberated form, which they called taf'īla (foot), or free verse. In Egypt, partaking of the accomplishments and new ideas of modernist poets , the poets of shi'r al-'āmmiyya started yet another movement. Poets of this movement, led by Fu'ād Ḥaddād and Ṣalāḥ Jāhīn broke away from the Arabic conventions of exclusively using the classical or literary linguistic register for poetry, and adopted the colloquial as the register of their poetry.KeywordsArab CountryArab WorldCultural LegacyEighth CenturyArabic DialectThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This paper looks at the philosophical ideas in Khalil Gibran’s poetry, recognizing him as an important modern voice in Arabic literature. Gibran, who combined Eastern mysticism with Western ideas of individualism, changed Arabic poetry by introducing themes like existentialism, spirituality, and personal freedom. His poems, full of deep reflection and symbolism, moved away from traditional Arabic poetry by using free verse and a more personal style. This study explores how Gibran's thoughts on life, death, love, and the self make his poetry a way to explore intellectual and spiritual ideas. It also examines how Gibran challenged strict social and religious norms, promoting freedom of the individual and self-discovery. Through a detailed analysis of his key poems, the paper highlights Gibran’s role in shaping modern Arabic literature and his influence on both Arabic and global literary thought. By placing Gibran’s poetry within the context of modernist literature, this study emphasizes his importance as a key figure who helped transform Arabic poetry in the 20th century.

Bahrain was and is the homeland to many eminent poets including Tarafa Ibn al-Abd – the author of the longest pre-Islamic mu’allaqa. Free verse (shir hurr) is at present popular amongst poets from Bahrain as represented by the works of Ali Abd Allah Khalifa, Alawi al-Hashimi, Qasim al-Haddad as well as poetry in prose as written by Ali ash-Sharqawi, Abd al-Hamid al-Qa’id and Yaqub al-Muharraqi. Poets of all leanings make reference to history, in particular the period in which independence was gained (1971). Although the country, as a result of the embarking on a path of liberal economics in the 1970s heralding prosperity and economic growth, is presented within its literature in a pessimistic current directed against the negative face of capitalism in its Bahraini manifestation. Literature has been subject to censorship since the 1970s as a result of the presence of a single-party political system. The above mentioned poets draw the reader to concepts such as: freedom, truth, love and justice. There is no absence in their work of references to the fatherland and involvement in national issues. They attempt to analyse the place of man in the contemporary world, his relations with others and his relationship with himself, as well as references to the nation and one’s country of origin.

Razvoj slovenske poezije po letu 1950 se da razumeti kot prozaizacijo in estetsko inverzijo, pisanje poezije v prostem verzu pa kot poezijo v prozi. Ker mnogi literarni zgodovinarji izum prostega verza pripisujejo ameriškemu pesniku Waltu Whitmanu, razprava uvodoma pojasni, na podlagi kakšnih ustvarjalnih načel je ta zasnoval svojo zbirko Travne bilke. Številni sodobni ameriški pesniki se imajo za Whitmanove naslednike, podrobneje pa je predstavljeno, kako to razume bitnik Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Walt Whitman je v prvi polovici 20. stoletja vplival na Otona Župančiča in Antona Podbevška, v drugi polovici in do danes pa neposredno prek prevodov njegove poezije v slovenščino in posredno prek bitniških pesnikov na mnoge slovenske ustvarjalce. Zato lahko v določeni meri in ob upoštevanju drugih vplivov tudi na razvoj prostega verza pri nas gledamo kot na nadaljevanje Whitmanove tradicije. Razprava prikaže, kakšne ustvarjalne rešitve so v prostem verzu našli Andrej Brvar, Esad Babačić in Uroš Zupan.