The Question of Tradition between Eliot and Adūnīs

Abstract

Arguing that the poetic quest is an instance of the modernist movement at crossroads, this article compares poetic quests as represented in the works of T. S. Eliot and ʿAlī Aḥmad Saʿīd, pen-named Adūnīs (Adonis). The article (re-)examines Eliot’s most famous poem The Waste Land and some of Adūnīs’s short poems alongside their respective prose works on literary criticism. I demonstrate how Eliot’s and Adūnīs’s poetic quests are an instance not only of the modernist movement at crossroads, but also of liminality where the modernist poet presents fluctuating images of himself: the poet as a knight that can change the world and, at the same time, as the little man who is blown in the wind. Hence Eliot’s and Adūnīs’s poetic texts are full of paradoxes and are peopled by those that bear within themselves opposites and are capable of everything and nothing. The modernist poet is Eliot’s Tiresias and Adunis’s al-Buhlūl. I illustrate how this instance of liminality is represented in their treatment of the theme of tradition.