Walt Whitman Quarterly Review

Meiners, Benjamin

English

Whitman’s Native Futurism: Frontier Erotics in the 1860 Leaves of Grass

Robbins, Timothy D.

A "Reconstructed Sociology": Democratic Vistas and the American Social Science Movement

Karbiener, Karen

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IN MEMORIAM: JOANN PECK KRIEG, 1932-2017
Joann Peck Krieg was a groundbreaking scholar, fierce “Whitmaniac,” valued 
teacher and mentor, and cherished friend.  She will continue to be a role model 
for many, for her professionalism and determination to build a remarkable career 
after raising a family and in what Whitman called “the years of middle age” 
(which he agreed “ought to be those of your best performances” in “Manly 
Health and Training”). She generated influence in and out of academic settings 
at a time when such scholarship was uncommon from a female perspective; for 
example, she chaired a panel on “Whitman on Women” and edited a collection of 
papers from the “Walt Whitman: Here and Now” conference at Hofstra Univer-
sity in 1980, in which not a single presentation of 25 was delivered by a woman 
(“America has been catching up with the Whitman who waits,” she shrewdly 
notes in her unsigned “Preface”). Joann assembled a year-by-year, often day-by-
day Whitman Chronology that is still a standard scholarly reference two decades 
on; her discussions of race, ethnicity, and sexuality in Walt Whitman and the 
Irish (2000) resonate through the latest work in Whitman studies. She loved her 
“Walt”—and she adored opera as he did.  After retiring from her professorship 
at Hofstra University in her mid-70s, Joann moved to an apartment within walk-
ing distance of Manhattan’s Lincoln Center and became an opera aficionada, as 
passionate about Luciano Pavarotti as Whitman had been over Marietta Alboni. 
At the time of her death, Joann left unfinished a book on Whitman and opera 
that her daughter, a professional editor, is currently revising.
Joann Peck, like Walter Whitman, was a native Long Islander; and both 
were equally proud of “starting from Paumanok.” Born in Jamaica, Queens, 
Joann graduated from secretarial school in 1950. After marrying John Krieg in 
1952 and raising two children on Long Island, she returned to school in her late 
thirties to earn her BA in 1974, an MA a year later (both at Hofstra University) 
and her PhD from CUNY in 1979. She began teaching in Hofstra’s English 
and American Studies departments in 1978 and retired in 2005.  Elected to Phi 
Alpha Theta and the Fulbright Specialist Program, Joann wrote or edited four-
teen books and numerous articles, organized major conferences for Hofstra and 
edited the proceedings of several of them, including two of the university’s pres-
idential conferences. She was involved in Hofstra’s Long Island Studies Institute 
from its beginnings in 1986; indeed, from early on, her writings reflected her 
own deep-rooted interest and engagement in local history and literature. The 
almost palpable connection she felt to her subject matter can be sensed in the 
precision and details of such books as Long Island and Literature, and encour-
aged such comments as she offered after verifying a manuscript of “Thou Vast 
Rondure Swimming in Space,” found in a Long Island basement in 1986: “I 
don’t know how to say it,” Joann told a Newsday reporter; “But it is overwhelming 
. . . touching something that was touched by the hands of this great person and 
was part of his creative life.”
Much of the Whitman scholarship accomplished by women in the twen-
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tieth century focused on the poet’s Long Island roots: Florence B. Freedman, 
Katherine Molinoff, Joan D. Berbrich, and Bertha H. Funnell all contributed 
significant research on the poet’s least-known years. Joann’s work on local poetry 
and history stands apart from such efforts: it was never simply regional or provin-
cial in nature, and its impact reached well beyond academic audiences.  From 
1970 to 1985, she served as a trustee of the Whitman Birthplace and later as 
president of the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association. She was president in the 
mid-1990s, when the Birthplace’s multi-million dollar Interpretive Center was 
approved, funded, and constructed; and she saw to conclusion a prolonged paper 
war over the content of one of the Center’s information panels, originally titled 
“I Am He That Aches With Love—Whitman’s Life of Love.” In June 1996, 
Joann gave “final approval” on text that included the title poem, a discussion 
of “same-sex love” and photographs of Whitman with Peter Doyle and Harry 
Stafford; six months and ten edits later, the panel was renamed “For the Love 
of Comrades,” no longer used the offending phrase, and featured a dominating 
image of Whitman and Anne Gilchrist (with the image of Walt and Pete reduced 
in size, and the other of Whitman and Stafford removed). Finding herself over-
ruled by Association board members who expressed concern about the original 
content’s reception by exhibition viewers, Joann reluctantly approved the Board’s 
revisions and stated in her final notes: “WW can still be a good American even 
if he is gay. Perhaps the kiddies needed to learn this, even if the parents—and 
teachers—haven’t.”
The omissions made in the so-called “love panel” have been the subject of 
much scrutiny and protest, and have encouraged the Birthplace Association’s 
current initiative to replace its signage. Joann—and her Walt—would be pleased 
to learn that plans for new panels on Whitman’s celebration of all types of sexu-
ality (as well as the story of how the Birthplace came to express Whitman’s words 
as openly and joyously as the poet himself did) are in the works for 2019, the 
bicentennial of Whitman’s birth.
I miss you, Joann, and the ways you brought Whitman’s message of love to 
your work and to the people in your life.
—Karen Karbiener, New York University


IN MEMORIAM: Joann Peck Krieg, 1932-2017

Review of&nbsp;Whitman, Walt. Song of Myself: With a Complete Commentary. Introduction and Commentary by Ed Folsom and Christopher Merrill

Whitman, Walt. Song of Myself: With a Complete Commentary. Introduction and Commentary by Ed Folsom and Christopher Merrill [review]

Front Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 35, no. 2

Folsom, Ed

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IN MEMORIAM: CHARLEY SHIVELY, 1937-2017
Charley Shively, known in Whitman Studies for his pioneering work on Whitman’s 
relationships with young men, died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 
6, 2017. Shively’s two books on Whitman—Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman’s 
Working Class Camerados (1987) and Drum Beats: Walt Whitman’s Civil War 
Boy Lovers (1989)—were both published by Gay Sunshine Press, and he always 
considered the books equal parts political action and academic discovery. Both 
books published, for the first time, large selections of the letters that young men 
had written to Whitman, and they were revelatory. Calamus Lovers examined 
Whitman’s relationship to Fred Vaughan, Tom Sawyer, Lewis Brown, Alonzo 
Bush, Elijah Fox, Nicholas Palmer, Peter Doyle, Jack Rogers, Jo Baldwin, Harry 
Stafford, and Bill Duckett. Drum Beats carried on the work he began in the first 
book, printing over a hundred pages of letters written to Whitman by nearly fifty 
Civil War soldiers, and introducing these letters with a smart and provocative 
analysis of gay sex in the Civil War and in Civil War hospitals. The books were 
controversial and tremendously influential. They pointed to the gaping silence 
of the voices of males who loved Whitman, voices that had been muted for over 
a century of Whitman scholarship. It was Shively’s demonstration of the vital 
importance of attending to those voices that was one reason the Walt Whitman 
Archive dedicated itself to publishing the entirety of the two-way correspondence 
of Whitman—printing not only Whitman’s letters, but all the known letters 
written to him.
Born in Gobbler’s Knob, Ohio, Shively attended Harvard College, where he 
earned a B.A., then went to the University of Wisconsin for his M.A. in history, 
then back to Harvard University for his Ph.D., again in history. Shively taught at 
Boston State College and then at the University of Massachusetts-Boston until 
his retirement in 2001. He was a Fulbright professor in Kenya, Ecuador, and 
Vietnam.
Shively was a major figure in the Gay Liberation movement from the 
Stonewall Riots forward and was instrumental in forming Gay Men’s Liberation in 
Boston and the Fag Rag collective, which published the first national post-Stone-
wall gay political journal; he also was involved in founding and sustaining Fag Rag 
Books, the Good Gay Poets collective and press, Boston Gay Review, and Gay and 
Lesbian Advocates and Defenders. One of his essays in Fag Rag, “Cocksucking 
as an Act of Revolution,” became a classic document of the Gay Liberation 
movement. Many attendees of the 1992 Walt Whitman Centennial Conference 
at The University of Iowa vividly remember Shively standing up, during a ques-
tion-and-answer period at a crowded plenary session, reading aloud Section 5 
of “Song of Myself,” and then asking, “Now isn’t that cocksucking, pure and 
simple?”
A poet, an activist, an editor, a scholar, a teacher, and a proud provocateur: 
Charley Shively was one of a kind in Whitman Studies.


IN MEMORIAM: Charley Shively, 1937-2017

Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography, Fall 2017

McInnes, Marion K

Following You: Second Person in Walt Whitman’s “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life”

Haydar, Adnan

Beard, Michael

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A TRANSLATION OF ABDEL-MUNEIM RAMADAN’S 
“WALT WHITMAN’S FUNERAL,” AND SOME NOTES ON 
WHITMAN IN THE ARAB WORLD
WE PRESENT HERE a translation into English of Egyptian poet Abdel- 
Muneim Ramadan’s (b. 1951) “Walt Whitman’s Funeral” [Janâzat 
Walt Witman], a remarkable 2012 poem that underscores the complex 
role that Whitman has played in the Arab world. As an aid to under-
standing the poem, we first offer a brief history of the Whitman-Arab 
relationship.
The Mahjar, or “emigrant” poets, were a small group of Lebanese 
and Syrian writers in the United States, affiliated with the New York-
based Arabic-language newspaper Al-Hudâ. The group flourished in 
the 1920s. They did not have a project in common except to break 
with the patterns of traditional Arabic poetry. Mahjar in Arabic does 
not name a particular common project: it simply means the dias-
pora of Arabs around the world. The poets were scattered: Khalil 
(“Kahlil”) Gibran (1883-1931) lived in Boston, Ameen Rihani (1876-
1940) primarily in New York, and Mikhail Naimy (1889 -1988) in 
Walla Walla, Washington, but also New York, as well as, during the 
first World War, France (where he served in the American army). 
They had one thing in common: they absorbed American poetry, 
and their distance from a strict critical establishment (back home in 
Syria and Lebanon) gave them freedom to experiment. Whitman’s 
name comes up often in their critical writings, and they seem to have 
agreed that it was Whitman’s influence that allowed them to redefine 
Arabic poetry. 
Rihani, writing in the preface to his 1923 collection Hutâf 
al-Awdiya [Hymns of the Valleys], makes Whitman’s innovations a 
pivotal point in literary history:
Milton and Shakespeare liberated English Poetry from the bonds of rhyme; and 
the American Walt Whitman freed it from prosodic bonds such as the conven-
tional rhythms and customary meter. But this freed verse has a new and par-
ticular rhythm, and a poem composed in it may follow numerous and varied 
metres.1 
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He emphasizes the force of the break: 
This type of new poetry is called vers libres in French and free verse in English, 
that is, free, or more properly, freed verse (in Arabic al-shi‘r al- hurr wa al-
mu laq).2
“Free” versus “freed” verse: Mounah Khouri’s translation of Rihani’s 
essay (al-hurr as “free” and al-mu laq as “freed”) captures something 
latent in the Arabic. Al-hurr is “free” in the political sense. Al- mu laq 
is perhaps “freer”: Hans Wehr’s dictionary offers “unlimited, unre-
stricted, absolute.”3 Similarly, in English “free,” a simple adjective, is 
a static state; “freed,” a passive participle, is a state that results from 
an act of will. The translation takes that break with tradition a step 
further in intensity. 
 Later in the same essay Rihani translates Whitman’s “To Him 
That Was Crucified” (Ilâ al-maslûb). Rihani was a Christian, but the 
effect of the poem is not sectarian. The vision of a utopian devotional 
community (“We walk silent among disputes and assertions, but reject 
not the disputers nor any thing that is asserted”) may matter more 
than the Christ-figure of the title.
 Naimy, in a 1949 article, “Walt Whitman: Father of Free Verse,” 
recapitulates the same argument in more specific terms—clearly 
directed towards the conservative Arabic critical tradition: 
The United States today leads the way in the world of industry, politics, war, and 
economics. It has not until recently, however, distinguished itself in any branch 
of art, literature, or philosophy, except in the free-verse movement. It was the 
American poet, Walt Whitman, who first advocated for this poetic genre and 
the first who practiced it with the might of a genius, the sincerity of a believer, 
and the enthusiasm of one who bears a new message. I have searched for a suit-
able Arabic word to describe this sort of baffling eloquence, that is something 
between poetry and prose, and I could not find a better word than al-munsari .4 
Munsarih is the name of a specific Arabic meter, one of many. Naimy’s 
point is that it is used only infrequently:
I do not mean that this word has anything to do with the Arabic poetic meter 
(al- munsarih) with the same name. There is in the word, however, the implica-
tion of freedom, liberty, and lack of restraint. In this genre, the poem flows to its 
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target with ease and with no restriction. Its main feature is that it is not bound 
to any rhyme or rhythm, but rather flows naturally, with musical rhythm and 
poetic ring.5 
Later in the essay, he characterizes Whitman’s style in less technical 
terms:
It flows, as he himself would say, the way a bird flies or a fish swims. It is devoid 
of ornament and embellishment. There is no metonymy or metaphor or embroi-
dery in it, only naked words that enter into a close union, eliciting the images, 
the thoughts, and the feelings that the poet aims to instill in your mind, and to 
stir up in your psyche. At times his long sentences create a sense of boredom, 
especially when he uses a lot of parenthetical clauses, but you cannot but feel the 
power, the faith, and the sincerity that pervade his poetry.6
This is followed by translations into Arabic of passages from Whit-
man’s “Salut Au Monde!” Naimy concludes with a parallel between 
English history and the future of Arabic. The free-verse moment in 
English would have ended, he suggests, like other fads, if it had not 
been “for the genius of a great poet like Walt Whitman.”7
It may be that in the Arab world the most influential translations 
of Whitman into Arabic were those of Yusuf Al-Khal (1917-1989), in 
his 1958 collection Dîwân al-shi‘r al-Amrîkî [Anthology of American 
Poetry]. The anthology is extensive, erudite, and well-versed in both 
cultures. It includes forty-two poets, beginning with Anne Bradstreet 
and Edward Taylor, and ending with Karl Shapiro and Robert Lowell. 
Al-Khal was (with his better-known colleague Adonis) among the 
collaborators in the project of the influential Beirut journal Majallat 
Shi‘r (1957-1964, 1967-1970). Al-Khal, who had lived in the U.S., 
working at the then newly formed United Nations, must have spent a lot 
of time immersing himself in American poetry as well, and Whitman 
plays a major role in his introduction:
With Walt Whitman, in particular, American poetry relinquished imitation and 
the use of banal subjects, seeking instead its inspiration from life itself and from 
suffering life’s experiences. Whitman opened life’s windows wide onto himself 
gulping down its experiences and freeing his imagination from the old modes 
and outworn styles. . . . Not only did Whitman liberate American Poetry (and 
all poetry) from the rigidity of form, but he was also able to rid it of the inher-
ited banality of content. . . . His poetic revolution had a far-reaching effect on 
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the future of Arabic poetry everywhere, and thanks to him, the free verse move-
ment took flight, liberating poetry from timeworn rhythmic patterns and forging 
personal rhythms that enabled the poems to express their own experiences. . . . 
Thanks to him, Arabic literature discovered this poetic style by way of Ameen 
Rihani and Gibran Khalil Gibran.8 
His choice of poems is interesting because it isn’t obvious: from Cala-
mus “In Paths Untrodden”; from By the Roadside “I Sit and Look 
Out”; from Drum Taps “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and 
Dim”; and sections 6, 7, 18, 21, and 68 from Song of Myself.
When Adonis refers to Whitman in his 1973 poem “A Grave for 
New York” (Qabr min ajil Niû Yurk), he uses him as an emblem of a 
lost America. A series of five verse paragraphs calls out to Whitman 
explicitly as a threatened memory (“Whitman, / I notice letters to you 
flying in the streets of Manhattan . . . Whitman, / I do not see you 
in Manhattan, and I saw everything . . . Whitman, / ‘The clock indi-
cates the moment’. . . .”9). “The clock indicates the moment” (Adonis’s 
“Al-sâ‘a tu‘lin al-waqt”) is from “Song of Myself” at one remove. This is 
because Adonis’s citations from Whitman, as Shawkat Toorawa points 
out in the notes to his English translation of “Grave,” are clearly drawn 
from Roger Asselineau’s 1956 French version (“L’horloge indique 
l’heure”). The fifth of the paragraphs concludes:
Whitman, 
let it be our turn now. I make a ladder of my gaze. I weave my steps into a pillow, 
and we shall wait. Man dies but he is more eternal than the grace. Let it be our 
turn now (93).
He writes as if it could be our turn now, as if there is still hope that 
Whitman’s prophetic optimism could be revived. 
In Abdel-Muneim Ramadan’s 2012 poem, “Walt Whitman’s 
Funeral,” Whitman is at the center but not as an actor. The action 
swirls around him. The American Civil War has been superimposed 
on Iraq, and Whitman is on what seems a modern battlefield, but the 
point is not his reaction to it, either confusion or acceptance. Rather, 
our attention is on a series of cameos. Kindred spirits and historical 
figures, most of them Iraqi, fill our field of vision. A series of historical 
figures, primarily Arab poets, most of them in an oppositional relation-
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ship to their own time, are placed in confrontation with Whitman, just 
long enough to sketch a poetic relationship with him. Khalil Gibran, 
for instance, seems to be, in Ramadan’s vision, working to replace him 
(“stabbed him with a wooden cross”). Al-Mutanabbi, the poet who 
famously claimed the role of prophet, seems to share an aesthetic of 
freedom with Whitman (“Walt Whitman met him behind the Statue 
of Liberty”). Whitman recognizes Abu Nuwas, the poet famous as 
a libertine and a poet of wine, not just as a kindred spirit but as a 
source of admiration (“Walt Whitman squats in homage before Abu 
Nuwas”). 
Whitman’s mute dialogue with his surroundings proceeds in frag-
ments, but these pieces add up to a single vision. In “Grave for New 
York,” Adonis hopes to continue Whitman’s vision, but not Ramadan. 
It is as if “Whitman’s Funeral” were testing Whitman’s relevance to 
an Arab poet at this moment in history and declaring it invalid. It is 
a melancholy narrative. Whitman’s one real act in the poem is to die. 
Evidently this time he has witnessed a war that has overcome his own 
characteristic optimism. 
What follows is our translation of Ramadan’s poem.10 “Walt 
Whitman’s Funeral” speaks for itself, but it might be worth knowing 
that the poet, like many Egyptian artists and writers, has provided 
a prominent voice to the national dialogue in post-Mubarak Egypt. 
It may be useful for readers outside the Arab world to know that 
Ramadan has spoken against the notion of the poet as a spokesperson 
for others and argued that the individual body is the most authentic 
reference of poetry. 
University of Arkansas      ADNAN HAYDAR
University of North Dakota                                  MICHAEL BEARD
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Walt Whitman’s Funeral
Abdel-Muneim Ramadan
So finally, atop the fender of a tank,
lounges Walt Whitman.
Finally he observes the streets of Baghdad.
He sees above him birds of paper. 
He ponders how the caliph’s palace was constructed
and how airplanes destroyed it.
Walt Whitman is not afraid of rivers.
After all, he drowned there before.
Walt Whitman is not afraid of palm trees.
After all, he let a palm tree approach and enfold him.
Walt Whitman is not afraid of a woman’s abaya,
not afraid of perfume, rouge, or camisole 
because he never loved a woman.
Those who accompany Walt Whitman 
will disperse before sunset.
Those who make Walt Whitman’s dinner 
wish he were a vegetarian.
Those who dislike Walt Whitman’s poems
write secret poems
about what robots think
and what they like to do, 
and write more poems about how valleys breathe,
the songs of wood cutters,
the sweat of plants.
Walt Whitman met Lorca at the cathedral in New York. 
He met him near the casement 
and on the lake, in front of the altar.
He met him in the hallway.
He met Lorca11 before he ran away.
Walt Whitman met Al-Mutanabbi behind the Statue of Liberty.
I met Walt Whitman as I was mixing 
charcoal, moss, fruits, grains and roots
to cook up something good to eat.
I met him as I lifted the translucent cover from my face.
Some wanted to kill Walt Whitman. 
Gibran stabbed him with the wooden cross.
Al-Hussein12 planted in his heart a wilted rose
seven thorns
and a tortoise.
Mahdiyya,13 daughter of the Mahdi, wore a white dress
and a headscarf. 
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She danced on his grave.
After reading Leaves of Grass the Virgin Mother wiped her mouth. 
The Virgin Mother embraced her own image in the hand mirror.
and became aware of the fingers of sleep rubbing the little ponds
and black elder
and the grass.
The concubines are looking at the mute waiter.
The concubines are the lucky ones.
Yet despite glory,
despite the song of memory,
no one reads the Old Testament.
Walt Whitman spread out on his thighs the Song of Songs
and ordered the cardinals out of the graveyard.
Everything is futile, mere grasping at the wind.
Walt Whitman is no longer lonely.
Walt Whitman is still looking for a lover who resembles him.
Here’s what his lips should look like,
and his eyes
his eyes, his chest, his legs, his feet. 
The senator said to him Search among the pilots.
The pope said to him Search among the angels.
The police said to him Search for the Bedouins.
The novelists advised him to go back to the Mississippi
or travel to Tangiers.
The soldiers shouted in his face:
Poet,
Monster.
The boss‘s wife smiled and removed her mouth from the picture.
The minister of defense told him that the earth was spacious and black,
that the sky was spacious and blue. 
Walt Whitman was not surprised.
He knows that his abode is in the earth,
that his house is waiting in the sky.
Walt Whitman requested that a mulberry tree keep him company everywhere 
he goes.
So finally, atop the fender of a tank,
lounges Walt Whitman.
Finally he observes the streets of Baghdad.
When he rests, he looks at himself
and at that tree.
Sometimes he does not see himself.
Sometimes he sees that tree as a wild boy,
sometimes he sees it as his twin sister,
sometimes he sees it as a tall ship,
the tall tower
and the tall gallows.
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Walt Whitman is still dreaming.
The tree is still a tree.
His fingers still avoid pressing the buttons of nightmares.
Walt Whitman frees himself from the months,
April, May, June, etc.
Walt Whitman squats in homage before Abu Nuwas,14 
in front of al-Rusafi,15
in front of al-Jawahiri.16
He never asks about Nazik al-Mala’ika.17
He passes without stopping under the statue of Badr Shakir al-Sayyab.18
He strips himself of hours, of minutes of seconds.
He ends up naked.
He shivers. He can’t find the pages he’s read all his life,
he shivers and can’t find the ceilings he slept under,
he shivers without a glance at the opposite shores,
he shivers. He can’t find even one of his enemies.
Walt Whitman climbs the mulberry tree.
He puts his neck between its branches.
Walt Whitman dangles there.
He’s afraid his fingers will press the buttons of nightmares.
The carpenters are preparing a coffin for Walt Whitman.
The grave diggers are looking for an unused plot
suitable for Walt Whitman’s corpse.
The children are thinking up a game to quiet his soul.
Christ is composing desperate, unruly hymns.
The poets receive condolences. They write elegies.
The sun grows sad and leaves.
And night with its heavy weight falls upon the earth
and strips itself of time,
plucks Baghdad up by the roots.
Walt Whitman’s corpse turns green and then it rots.
It rots while the songs from virgins’ mouths sing     
“Rise from the grave Whitman,
rise from the grave Walt.”
Walt Whitman died.
He turned into the fender of the tank where he was sitting.
The streets of Baghdad rose into view.
The paper birds reappeared
as black shoes
smaller than the soldiers’ feet,
smaller than the cold. 
And the air can hardly disturb them.
The air is thin like sewer lines,
like gas lines,
like chemical fertilizer.
And Walt Whitman stretches out on red earth.
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He looks at his own corpse with its soiled hair.
He looks for a long time.
He notices the place the gun fell,
the corner where the camera appeared,
and he notices what’s left of the desert.
He finishes dying 
without taking in it the slightest pleasure.
NOTES
1   Mounah Khouri, “Prose Poetry: A Radical Transformation in Contemporary 
Arabic Poetry,” Edebiyât 1.1 (1976), 130.
2   Khouri, 130.
3   Hans Wehr, Arabic English Dictionary: The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern 
Written Arabic, ed. J. M. Cowan (Urbana, IL: Spoken Language Services, 1994 
[4th edition]). 
4   Mikhail Naimy, Al-majm a al-k milah (Beirut: D r al- ilm li al-mal y n, 
1987), 412.
5   Naimy, 412.
6   Naimy, 418.
7   Naimy, 418.
8   Yusuf Al-Khal, Dîwân al-shi‘r al-Amrîkî (Beirut: Majallat Shi‘r, 1958), 8-9. 
9   Adonis (Ali Ahmed Said), A Time Between Ashes and Roses, trans. Shawkat 
M. Toorawa (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 164-167. Originally 
published as Waqt bayna al-Ramâd wa al-ward (Beirut: Dâr al-‘Awda, 1972).
10  Our translation originally appeared online in Words without Borders (August 
2012), wordswithoutborders.com, as “Funeral for Walt Whitman.” Our trans-
lation of Ramadan’s essay on Whitman, “Whitman and Me: Notes on a Poetic 
Education,” appeared online in Words without Borders in November 2014.
11  Federico Garcia Lorca (1888-1936); Abdel-Muneim Ramadan has in mind 
Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York, published posthumously in 1942.
12  Al-Hussein (d. 608 CE), son of the Prophet’s nephew Al , killed at Karbala. 
He became a fundamental figure in the development of Shî‘ism.
13  Mahdiyya (b. 869), “daughter of the Mahdi,” evidently the daughter of the 
twelfth imam in Shi‘î theology.
14  Abu Nuwas (756-814), influential, innovative poet of the ‘Abbasid Period, 
famous for his wine poems.
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15  Ma‘ruf al-Rusafi (1875-1945), Iraqi poet and novelist (in Turkish and Arabic).
16  Al-Jawahiri (1899-1997), Iraqi, pre-modern poet. He was known particularly 
for the phrase “the wounds of the sacrificed are mouths.”
17  Nazik al-Mala’ika (1923- 2007), also an Iraqi poet. Her poetry collection 
‘Ashiqat al-Layl (Love of the Night, 1947) was an early introduction to free verse. 
18  Badr Shakir al-Sayyab (1926-1964), influential early Arab modernist. An 
excellent study in English of his centrality in the development of the new poetry 
is Terry DeYoung’s Placing the Poet: Badr Shaker al-Sayyab and Postcolonial Iraq
(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998).


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