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A Study on the Arabic Prose Poems

Modem Arabic poetry had to travel a long and tortuous road before reaching the new form. The revolt against the Qaṣidah had started with the contact between the Arabs and Western poetry for the attempts to translate European poetry into Arabic and to imitate its contents and form. It led to the imitation and to the adaptation of the techniques and the styles of Western poetry, and finely to the creation of new forms. After lots of experiments for the creation of new form from the ninetieth century, Arab poets, mainly Christians, wrote poetic prose, or what they termed shi'r manthu:r. In modern Arabic Poetry two types of poetic prose were developed, the one rooted in the Bible, Christian liturgical literature and the French romantic poetic prose, and the other the Islamic rhetorical style rooted in the Koran and in Abbasid prose. Gibran Khalil Gibran adopted Biblical poetic techniques, but Amin al-Rihani adopted the Koranic style. There are many important differences between these two types of Arabic poetic prose. The Islamic poetic prose is intellectual and clear, rhythmical and rhymed, highly polished. garnished with archaic expressions and rare literary words. On the other hand, the Christian style was precise simple, plain and direct, so it made possible the expression of meditative mood and the flow of tender, melancholic and dreamy emotions. From 1960s the new poets who called their poetry Qaṣidah al-Nathr appeared. They disregarded all former concepts of poetry, trying to write modern and universal poetry, reflecting the spirit of the new age and rejected the former rational, logical, idealistic and humanistic vision of the world. This group was led by the Shi'r(Poetry) magazine in Beirut and the leading poets were Adonis and Unsi al-Hajj. Adonis claimed himself to write the first prose poem in 1958. And he underlined that the prose poem must be an organic, independent whole and also an artistic, distinct construction. For him the source of its power is unity and intensity. To Unsi al-Hajj prose poem is a medium to express his revolt against the holiness of the Arabic language and its cultural heritage, and to challenge the stagnation in Arab life and its narrowness of view. In conclusion, several modern Arab poets have been stimulated by the efforts and achievements of the earlier modernists and have succeeded in creating prose poems. This new poetry, rejecting the inviolability of traditional metrics and lifeless poetic diction in favor of content through the intensity of the artistic process and the imaginative use of words, metaphors, symbols, imagery, mythological allusion, dramatic monologues, and other devices. So this form has opened wide horizons for the development of contemporary Arabic poetry.