Reconfiguring Tradition in Arabic Poetry: Ethics, Memory, and the Poetics of Continuity

Belqes Al-Sowaidi

doi:10.53286/hcvca575

Authors

Belqes Al-Sowaidi Professor of Linguistics, Postgraduate Studies Department, International Peace College South Africa, Cape Town, South Africa. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3752-2684

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.53286/hcvca575

Keywords:

Arabic poetry, tradition; T. S. Eliot, cultural memory, ethical criticism, poetic continuity

Abstract

This study investigates the literary tradition of Arabic poetry through a critical engagement with T.S. Eliot’s essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent. Eliot’s perspective remains foundational to understanding tradition as a dynamic relationship between the past and the present. Yet, it is also rooted in a Western literary canon and largely centred on aesthetic order, formal continuity, and canonical reconfiguration. This study, therefore, treats Eliot not as a universal model to be applied unchanged to Arabic poetry, but as a theoretical interlocutor whose limits become visible when placed in dialogue with a different poetic tradition. It argues that Arabic poetry not only confirms but also goes beyond Eliot’s model, revealing tradition as an ethically charged and culturally remembered continuum. Drawing on ethical criticism and cultural memory theory, this study examines selected Arabic poets across classical, revivalist, and modernist periods: al-Mutanabbī, Abū Nuwās, Maḥmūd Sāmī al-Bārūdī, Aḥmad Shawqī, Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb, Adonis, ʿAbd Allāh al-Baradūnī, and Maḥmūd Darwīsh. It applies a comparative reading to trace how the Arabic poetic tradition has been consolidated, disrupted, revived, transformed, reconstructed, and rearticulated. The study concludes that the Arabic poetic tradition is neither a stable archive nor a sequence of inherited forms. Rather, it is an ethically oriented and culturally remembered continuum through which aesthetic continuity, moral value, historical consciousness, collective memory, and cultural identity intersect under changing historical and existential conditions.

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