has been accounted neither good nor deserving of esteem. Let no one suppose, then, that everyone

who has set down prose lines is thereby writing poetry!

As for the conditions of excellence, the first of them is creativity — the making of what is new and fresh in matter and form — and the expression of the felt experience in living, pulsing flashes that snatch the reader up, so that he loses himself in the poet's regions, sharing his sensations and the stirrings of his heart...

And the inner cohesion of the poem is, in prose poetry, among its most essential constituents; without it, neither the splendor of its impact nor its effect upon the soul is secure. Here we call attention to that looseness and slackness, and the like, from which most published poems suffer — as when the poet resorts to prolongation without

enlarging the thought, or by way of repetition and padding, which destroys the splendor and cuts short the thread of the reader's rapture...

And grievously does the prose poet go astray if he deliberately affects symbol and obscurity, so as to delude his readers with the power of his inspiration and his nearness to the miraculous; for in such attempts lie bankruptcy and failure, both complete. How fitting it is for our poet to touch suggestion with a gentle touch, with the utmost simplicity and art, and to paint poetic canvases with the utmost skill, so that the reader smells the fragrance of the blossom, feels the prick of the thorn, and delights his ear with the song of a nightingale...

Nor shall we belittle the importance of the element of music in prose poetry: without music the poem passes, without question, into the domain of

prose — this besides due regard for the ordering of words, and the choosing of the one word and the one letter to the exclusion of all others, and the like.

The craft of prose poetry, then, is not easy, as some imagine — for all that it accords with nature and native instinct more than metered poetry does.. Like every other literary form, it passes through the stages of birth, and submits to polishing under the supervision of authen-tic taste and conscious practice.

Our Arabic poetry, as I see it, is on the road to its liberation from meter and rhyme. As for fixing the value of this poetry, that is beyond our power now; the future alone may judge for it or against it... Will survival be written for it, or will it go, with many another novelty of the age, dust into dust?