Second: the artistic traits of the school of Apollo

02Second: the artistic traits of the school of Apollo

1) The personal nature of the experience, and nostalgia

• Belief in the personal (subjective) nature of the poetic experience, and longing for the lands of memory.
• Example: Ibrahim Nagi remembering the house of his beloved, so his heart flutters and he weeps over the wounded past; and al-Hamshi in "The Withered Orange" recalling the memories of his youth.

2) A new language

• Using Arabic in a new way in word-sense, metaphor and image: "the lunar perfume", "the soft fragrance", "the weeping twilight", "the lost sailor", "the burnt breaths", "the lost paradise".
• Words frequent in their poetry: the field, the light, tyranny, death, time, perfume, fragrance, the sail, the sailor, blossom, rose, honey, exile, sunrise and sunset, twilight and horizon, the bank and the shore, the oasis.
• Embodiment (tajsid): turning abstractions from the conceptual into the sensory — as when Nagi says that yearning withered and folded itself away.
• Personification (tashkhis): giving a human quality to the non-human — as al-Hamshi's "the evening breeze steals a perfume".
• Symbol and agile words, and sometimes foreign words and myths: the carnival, Osiris, Venus, Akhenaten.
• Care for imagery — the palm, the light and the wind in Mahmoud Hassan Ismail, and mythical images in most of its poets.

3) Love of nature

• Devotion to nature, its beauty and intimate converse with it; their diwans and poems carry names that prove it: "Glimpses of Spring", "Rays and Shadows", "Return of the Shepherd", "Over the Waves", "The Spring" by Abu Shadi; "Songs on the Nile" by Saleh Jawdat; "Songs of the Cottage" by Mahmoud Hassan Ismail; "A Voice from the Sky" by Abu al-Qasim al-Shabibi.

4) Pessimism and sorrow

• Pessimism, surrender to pain and grief, contemplation and despair — so much that Mahmoud Hassan Ismail titled a diwan "Where Can I Flee?".
• There is no contradiction between loving nature and being pessimistic: they flee to nature away from pain and pour their sorrows into it.

5) A plurality of subjects

• Woman, the suffering of life's torment and injustice, nature, complaint, longing for memories, and the depiction of misery.
• Distance from political poetry, except for Abu Shadi who wrote much of it, and Ibrahim Nagi.