Good Measure: Poetic Form, Popular Politics, and Questions of Meter in Modern Arabic Poetry

FAIN: FT-279175-21

Emily Drumsta
University of Texas at Austin (Austin, TX 78712-0100)

Research primary sources and write the first chapter of a book that examines the use of classical poetry forms among modern Arab poets.

Good Measure offers a new history of modernity in the Arab world, focusing not on changes in political leadership or economic relations, but rather on poetry and poetics— and specifically, on the surprising durability of classical poetic forms in modern Arabic poetry. To compose metered poetry in Arabic, I argue, was not necessarily to be backward-looking or conservative. Meter and rhyme facilitated the oral transmission of poetry when publishing resources were limited, and the ancient meters were often used as forms of anti-colonial protest. When Arab poets discussed topics like “freedom,” “constraint,” “unity,” and “originality” in poetry, they were talking about much more than meters, strophes, and rhymes. The language of poetic form, I argue, was a metonymic one: poetry and its critical paratexts became the spaces where Arab intellectuals worked through questions of Arab identity, national citizenship, technological modernity, religion, secularism, and interactions with the West.