It is hard to imagine a more superficial, trivializing view of poetry, and one less conducive to an understanding of the poetic experience, than that which has long prevailed in the Arab world.
A rare and beautiful book about Arab poetics and the most prominent example of modern Arabic literary criticism, Adonis goes back, as all great innovators do, to history, and digs up the 'poetics of modernity' that has always been present in Arabic literature and contrasts it with our dominant understanding of poetics: Pre-Islamic poetry/orality.
The book is structured in 4 parts:
1.Poetics and Orality in the Jāhiliyya: Where Adonis examines in full detail the poetics of Pre-Islamic poetry and how language scholars and grammarians, like Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi, dissected the musicality of Pre-Islamic meter and rhythm, and created a large number of rules about the shape and sound of the poetic form. Adonis also tracks certain ideas about poetry and the poet that were extremely prevalent and later theorized as essential. Ideas like how poetry is supposed to be an effortless, almost improvisational gesture. Something that comes out from the poet unaided by thought or deliberation. Another example would be that poetry should be crystal clear, transparent, without ambiguity or depth. He quotes Al-Jahiz when he says that "the best poetry is the one that is understood instantly."
2.Poetics and the Influence of the Qur’ān: Here Adonis points out how the prosaic nature of the Quran came to defy pre-Islamic orality and served as a radical break from the previous conception of poetics. Content came to the forefront, composition, metaphor, and badee' بديع (figures of speech), triumph over improvisation and effortlessness.
3.Poetics and Thought: Adonis attacks the separation of poetry and thought in Arabic literary criticism and shows how a few "ancient" poets (Abu Tammam, Abu Nuwas, Abu Alaa Al Ma'arri, Al-Niffari) overturned the insistence on Pre-Islamic orality and ushered in the spirit of 'modernity' and reunited poetry and thought.
4. Poetics and Modernity: Adonis, in the closing chapter of this short, yet dense book, sets out to strike the killing blow (he has been attacking this single idea the entire book up until now) to the single most pernicious dogma looming over Arabic thought: What is ancient is best, what is new and innovative is bad, imported, unequal, unworthy. He believes the "return to tradition" types and "let's copy what the West is doing" types, when it comes what Arabic poetry today should be, are both wrong. Firstly because our tradition is far richer and more varied than what the close-minded dogmatists believe, and because 'modernity' already has a rich heritage in our literature, contrary to what people who want to adopt western forms believe.
I have scarcely done justice to the enlightening discussions and analysis contained within this book, what I have written here is a very rough outline. If you find any of these ideas interesting, please read the book on your own. It's a slim 90 pages or so but the content and luminous thought within amounts to hundreds of pages.
For an Arab poet to be truly modern his writing must glow like a flame which rises from the fire of the ancient, but at the same time is entirely new.