Traits of the school of al-Diwan

03Traits of the school of al-Diwan

• Combining the two cultures: Arabic and English.
• Ambition: the school's young men look to the horizons and the highest ideals, but their ambitions outrun the reality of their age.
• Organic unity: the poem is a living being in which each part has its function and place, as each organ of the body does, so its subjects are not multiple and its parts do not clash under one title.
• Contemplation: they reflect on the universe and search deeply into the secrets of existence.
• Sincerity of expression and distance from exaggeration.
• A touch of sadness, pain, pessimism and despair.
• Freedom from the old: they did not borrow the old literary material but used the language of their age.
• Distance from occasional subjects and from political and social topics.
• Deepening phenomena: they cared for the essence of things, so thought came before feeling in their work.
• The title: they deepened the idea of titling a poem and went on to title the whole diwan — "A Passing Traveller" for al-Aqqad, "Flowers of Autumn" for Shukri — whereas their predecessors named the diwan after its owner (the diwan of al-Barudi, the diwan of Shawqi).
• Al-Mazini evidenced artistic unity with verses addressed to Shawqi, in which he says that he wore the mantle of the age for twenty pilgrimage seasons.