The Laity Outside Poetry's Temple

Abstract

This chapter examines how secularism pervades Arabic prose poets' relation to the public. Unlike the traditional poets who place themselves above the public and unlike modernist poets of free verse who consider themselves ahead of the public, prose poets have a tendency to position themselves in a place that not only contains the two earlier positions but also transcends them. For prose poets, poetry is its own realm. Paradoxically, their argument that poetry is self-sufficient is punctured by another claim: that their poetry requires mediation for the laity. Six female poets mentioned in this book were devoted mainly to prose while occasionally dabbling in free verse. Two of them found the prose poem to be more feminine, presumably consistent with the secular freedom advanced by feminism in its dominant modes.