Speaking of oratory, I am reminded of poetry, which held among the Arabs a place surpass-ing that of oratory and flourished side by side with it, so that the poet was an orator and the orator a poet. Poetry, too, entered its period of decline long ago, and the first signs of weakness and imita-tion appeared on it as early as the days of Abu Tammam, who said:

Behold, the very soul of poetry has died — and if death's doom has passed it by, it lies in its last throes.

And poetry's position grew still more precarious with the appear-ance of al-Jahiz, who succeeded in setting prose above poetry and giving it the first place in his own age and in the ages that followed.

I say that poetry's standing had already dwindled before our time. And despite some happy attempts at renewal made by our poets under the influence of Romanticism and Symbolism, we can only acknowledge that this was a momentary renaissance which was not destined to endure. For poetry is shrinking, not in the Arab countries alone but in the whole world — and in the West, which sweeps us along in its current. Scholars are agreed that the present age "knows no great poet." Important poetic genres — the epic, tragedy, comedy — have withered away, and prose drama and its offshoots have taken their place; lyric poetry now appears in short-breathed pieces, or has dissolved into a poetic prose marked by facility and slackness, in a diction locked in obscurity and strangeness, from which one catches the scent of vexation and discontent, or of the desire to attract notice. The cinema has crowded the stage hard; the literature of speed reigns, with the ascendancy of the short story and journalistic writing; and rarely today will you find a poet who confines his production to poetry without straying into some of the prevailing prose arts.

In view of all that has been said, the author of the articles "With Women Writers from America"

should not be surprised that there are no women poets in Lebanon. Except that his statement needs one correction: Lebanon has at least one woman poet — Joumana Ahdab, who published her French collection "VIVRE" this year.

As for the three women poets whose existence he noted outside Lebanon, only one of them do we acknowledge to possess the poetic gift.

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