First: the Revival school, the generation of development, and the factors of the renaissance of modern poetry

03First: the Revival school, the generation of development, and the factors of the renaissance of modern poetry

• The school of Revival and Resurrection is the life-buoy that saved the Arabs' poetic corpus from extinction.
• Al-Barudi's leadership: he emulated (ʿāraḍa) the great masters of the ancient poets of the Jahili, Umayyad and Abbasid ages — such as al-Nābigha, al-Mutanabbī, Abu Tammām and al-Buḥturī — in their metres and rhymes, to restore to poetry its awe, its strength and its eloquence after decades of triviality and dry rhetorical ornament in the Ottoman age.
• The generation of development (his pupils): al-Barudi taught an elite of outstanding poets face to face (Ahmed Shawqi, Hafiz Ibrahim, Abdel-Mohsen al-Kazemi), by correspondence (Shakib Arslan), and through reading the book "The Literary Means (al-Wasīlah al-Adabiyyah)" of Sheikh Hussein al-Marsafi.
• Renewal factors came together for them that had not been available to their teacher: openness to Western culture (mastery of foreign languages, translation, reading European literatures); the national struggle, awareness of the people's freedom and the constitution of 1923; engagement with the problems of the Islamic world; the calls for the liberation of women by Qasim Amin; and the founding of the Egyptian University.
• Manifestations of development in Shawqi: (a) turning from classical panegyric to historical poetry, as in his great poem "The Major Events of the Nile Valley"; (b) depicting modern achievements and inventions instead of describing the she-camel and the horse — his description of the aeroplane "Is it an eagle that appeared in the rein of the sky… or a cloud fleeing from the violent winds?" and his descriptions of the ship and the submarine; (c) leading Arab verse drama — he wrote the historical and lyrical plays "The Death of Cleopatra", "The Madman of Layla", "Cambyses", "Ali Bey the Great", "Antarah" and the comedy "Sat al-Huda", and so was acclaimed Amir of Poets in 1927; (d) Ahmed Moharram's bending of poetry towards the epic: he adapted Arabic verse to the historical epic narrative in his huge diwan "The Glory of Islam (Majd al-Islam)" — the "Islamic Iliad" (1933) — which depicted the campaigns of the Messenger and the careers of the Companions.