Second: renewal in content and subject

02Second: renewal in content and subject

1) Painting the worries of people

• The new poets depicted people's worries, problems, hopes and aspirations.
• Example: Abu Sunna in "The Questions of the Trees" treats the position of the twentieth-century human torn between reaching for a passing material gain and holding on to enduring values.
• The trees ask him at night to throw himself into the current of a river coming from the depths of despair; he then dialogues with his heart: "What is the meaning of paradise?" — and the heart answers that he should travel inside himself until he reaches the human, then his homeland, then God.

2) Poetry as adherence to reality

• They understood poetry as adherence to reality, a feeling for it, and expression of it in all its faces: sincerity and falseness, progress and backwardness, joy and despair.
• And for what is in it of struggle between freedom and slavery, justice and oppression and the rest of life's contradictions.
• Example: Salah Abdel-Sabour in "Torn Seasons (Fousoul Muntaza'a)".

3) Death and the end

• They spoke of the end and death, as in al-Sayyab's poem "Night of Parting (Laylat Wada')".

4) A plurality of subjects

• Humanity's stance towards the universe, history and myths; the affairs of the homeland; and the reviving of heritage.
• Example: Salah Abdel-Sabour drawing on the saying of Ubayd bin al-Abras in "the time has come for the ray to set".