Trends in the development of new Arabic poetry in Egypt (Second half of the twentieth century)

Abstract

The beginning of the 20th century is a period of awakening and a great turning point for the Arab world, for its creative thinking. The aspiration to renew this era was most reflected in Arabic literature, particularly in Arabic poetry. It was a period of cardinal versification, content and ideological transformation of classical Arabic poetry, and it was directly related to the development of romanticism in Arabic literature. Literary critical organizations are created, and the new calls and ideas of these organizations greatly determined the formal-content changes of the new Arabic poetry and accelerated the process of rejection of classical poetics. In the first half of the 20th century, two completely new phenomena for Arabic poetry were finally formed: prose verse (Shi’r Mansur) and free verse (Shi’rHurr). New poetry developed not only in Egypt, but also in other countries of the Arab East, primarily in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. From the second half of the twentieth century, the question of the involvement and role of writers in public life became relevant. This issue is discussed in Egyptian prose and poetry. Socially important problems that faced the Arab world after the end of the Second World War were left out of the attention of the romantic poets. In the new generation of poets, the idea of the writer's service to society is getting stronger. All this led to a somewhat negative reaction to romanticism in Arabic literature. The time has come for changes in poetry.  Innovations in poetry were not formed by rejecting the experience of the romantics, but were connected with the main changes that occurred in the metrical system of Arabic verse. In the development of "new poetry" in Egypt from the second half of the 20th century, Arab critics and literary scholars distinguish three main periods - the first includes the 50s-60s; the second in the 70s; The third period was in the 80s-90s. It should be noted that the fiction that is created in Egypt is one of the components of the general Arabic literature, which is mainly based on the literary Arabic language, like the literature of other Arab countries; However, during this period, poetry was also created in the Egyptian dialect.