Machine summary:
And yet it is impossible to withhold praise from the recent book of Gustav von Griinebaum, Die Wirklichkeitweite der friiharabischen Dichtung, in which the young Orientalist has undertaken a study of early Arabic poetry up to the Umayyad period, viewing it as work of art and applying such principles of literary criticism as are generally employed at the present day.
In another essay, the author under review has tried to analyze Arabic poetry and to ascertain the indebtedness of one poet to another.
This conception of poetry not as a means of self-expression but as a factor in social life, is the reason why even such poems as deal with the most intimate sphere of human life, with love and death, seem to be lacking in the personal touch and to be using standardized motifs and stereotyped symbols.
In spite of the minute observation and detailed description of natural phenomena and of animals and the inanimate world, nature as such has no place in Arabic poetry.
In my essay on the nasib, I have tried to oppose this traditional view of the stereotyped and schematic character of the nasib and have tried to show how in the literature of everv people there are types and patterns of form-moulds so to say-into which the poet's individual feelings have tb be cast.
to be admitted that Goethe has found an individual expression for his emotional experience, whereas the Arab poet uses conventionalforms for the purpose.