BASIC ISSUES AND PRINCIPLES

Writing in 274/887, the ʿAbbasid poet and literary theorist Ibn al-Muʿtazz expressed the feeling that he was exploring a new territory of literary enquiry by identifying a new “poetics” which had emerged with the “modern” poets (muḥdathūri) of the second and third centuries of Islam. The term al-badīʿ by which he characterized this poetics had been used before by al-Jāḥiẓ in a brief reference attributing the actual coinage of the term to the transmitters (rāmīs) of poetry. The time gap between the first appearance of the term and its usage to designate a distinct trend in Arabic poetry might well span a whole century. Yet when Ibn al-Muʿtazz wrote, delimiting its boundaries and identifying its constituents, he did so with an obvious degree of tentativeness. His work, he said, represented a personal choice and allowed for the possibility of others defining the new poetics and identifying its elements in different ways. A few decades later, another critic of a very different temperament and education, Qudāmah b. Jaʿfar, wrote on poetry with an equal feeling of being a pioneer, asserting that, despite much work on various aspects of poetry, nobody had produced a book on its critical evaluation. Moreover, Qudāmah felt that his was a new territory unmapped by critics and thus lacking a specialized terminology which could furnish the necessary background for his discussion.