Second: the great Romantic schools — the emotional trend, al-Diwan and Apollo

04Second: the great Romantic schools — the emotional trend, al-Diwan and Apollo

• The emotional trend and Mutran: he moved from imitating French Romanticism to expressing the poet's own sincere individual conscience (wijdān). In the preface to his diwan in 1908 he announced the traits of his poetry: "This is modern poetry, and its pride is that it is modern; its maker is not its slave; the demands of metre and rhyme do not carry it against its intention; the correct meaning is said in the eloquent word; and regard is paid not to the poet of the single line alone but to the beauty of the poem in its composition, its organic unity, and its matching of psychological truth." He blamed the Revivalists for turning away from the self towards occasion-poetry, and for the disintegration of the poem.
• The school of al-Diwan: founded by the trio (al-Aqqad, al-Mazini, Shukri), influenced by English Romanticism; they proclaimed that poetry expresses the human self and what moves within it — but they were marked by a dry rational-philosophical-contemplative bent, so that mind and thought outweighed conscience and emotion in clarity of their verse. They attacked the Revival school sweepingly in their book "al-Diwan in Literature and Criticism" (1921), and called for organic unity and for one comprehensive title for the poem and for the whole diwan — such as al-Aqqad's diwan "A Passing Traveller (ʿĀbir Sabīl)" and Shukri's "Flowers of Autumn (Āzhār al-Kharīf)" — to indicate a unifying intellectual frame.
• The school of Apollo: born in 1932 after the issue of its famous magazine and the founding of its society, led by Dr Ahmed Zaki Abu Shadi and Dr Ibrahim Nagi; it profited from the literary battles between Revivalists and Diwanists and was influenced by the Romantic literature of Mahjar, especially Gibrán Khalil Gibrán. Its traits: using language anew in word-senses and imaginary metaphors (the lunar perfume, the soft fragrance, the lost sailor, the burnt breaths); personification (giving dead things the attributes of persons) and embodiment (turning abstractions into material bodies); flooded longing for the lands of memory and youth; love of nature, its beauty and intimate converse with it; and the use of free verse with a leaning to light metres and quiet music.