The Magazine Shir and the Poetics of Modern Arabic Poetry

The book comprehensively examines the Shir magazine published in Beirut (1957-1964; 1967-1969). The magazines editors sought to generate a profound change in the role and form of Arabic poetry as a tool to support a significant leap forward in the Arab thinking and writing. The book traces the mechanism of development of the magazines content and the thinking of its main editors, through in-depth textual analysis of the three main branches of the magazines content: translated poetry, original Arabic poetry, and articles of literary criticism. Each of these branches is accompanied by a complete appendix of relevant items. The analysis revals the significant role that Shir played in enabling a new kind of secular and personal poetics, including that of prose-poetry and vision poems.