Towards A Structural Analysis of Pre-Islamic Poetry

Abstract

Modern views on pre-Islamic poetry have not markedly advanced our understanding of the structure of the poem beyond the views of the critics of the first three centuries of Hijra. In fact, if anything, modern views are more rigidly formulated, show a greater tendency towards generalizations, and are far less perceptive, as well as being based on a degree of knowledge and familiarity with the poetry inferior to that of the early critics. Ibn Qutayba's famous passage which attempts a description of the process through which the poet developed his poem remains one of the most perceptive statements on the subject. He, at least, had the objectivity and modesty to attribute the view expressed in his passage to ba'd ahl al-adab (a person, or people, of knowledge in the field of language and poetry). Ibn Qutayba does not claim that the statement he quotes was based on an analysis of the properties of the corpus of the poetry. However, the most interesting aspect of this statement is that it interprets the structural properties of the poem in psychological terms. It does not label the process a conventional device imposed by the tradition and by the poets' lack of desire to break away from that tradition. The interpretation the statement offers is also functional, in that it asserts that the process of growth in the poem is not arbitrary and illogical but purposeful, conscious, and pertaining to the total structure of the poem. In this sense Ibn Qutayba's remark is also structural, because it considers the structure of the poem in relation to the structure of other poems in the tradition.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.