First: the circumstances in which the school of Apollo appeared

01First: the circumstances in which the school of Apollo appeared

The reality it emerged into

• It appeared at the start of the fourth decade of the last century (the early 1930s), after a literary battle between the school of al-Diwan and the conservative poets (the Revivalists).
• Shukri had stopped writing after his seventh diwan "Flowers of Autumn" (1918); his two friends al-Aqqad and al-Mazini attacked him, and then al-Mazini turned to journalism, the story and the essay.
• Al-Aqqad alone remained of the Diwanists, occupied with literary genres other than poetry.
• Into this reality — in which both the conservative and the al-Diwan directions had frozen — Apollo came trying to go past both of them and complete what was lacking in them.

The streams and forming factors of the school

• Profit from Khalil Mutran, from the literary quarrel between Revivalists and Diwanists, and from the Romantic poetry — original and translated — and the critical articles published by al-Aqqad, al-Mazini and Shukri; so the school turned to renewal and to overwhelming emotion.
• Influence by the European Romantics, the English above all: the leader of the school Ahmed Zaki Abu Shadi studied medicine in England for about ten years.
• His colleagues (Ibrahim Nagi, Ali Mahmoud Taha, Mohamed Abdel-Mouatti al-Hamshi, Saleh Jawdat…) mastered foreign languages and read European and Russian literature.
• Influence by the literature of Mahjar, above all the poetry of Gibrán Khalil Gibrán, which gave their verse a sharp emotional direction.
• The spirit of liberation: its poets felt the independence of the self and individual freedom, and were soaked in a revolutionary spirit ever since the 1919 revolution against the English occupation.

The name and the magazine

• "Apollo" comes from Apollo, the Greek god of light, art and beauty; taking this name itself shows the influence of foreign cultures.
• The school's poetry is tied to the appearance of its magazine "Apollo" in 1932, and in the same year the Apollo Society was formed and took the magazine's name.
• They adopted Khalil Mutran as their spiritual father.
• Only a little work of theirs had appeared before the magazine: Abu Shadi's first diwan "Calls of the Dawn", Ali Mahmoud Taha's poem in "al-Dastour" newspaper (1918), and the Tunisian Abu al-Qasim al-Shabibi's preface to his diwan "The Spring".
• But 1932 saw their real break-out and the publication of most of their diwans.