Free verse, Arabic - Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE
[Article]
DeYoung, Terri
Leiden
Brill
(1,160 words)
Free verse (Ar. al-shiʿr al-ḥurr ) was the most successful metrical experiment in twentieth-century Arabic poetry. The principles of free verse in Arabic were discovered and popularised after World War II by two young Iraqi poets, Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb (d. 1964) and Nāzik al-Malāʾika (d. 2007). They knew one another as students in the English department at the Higher Teachers' Training College (which would eventually be incorporated into the University of Baghdad), although both claimed that they arrived independently at the form later called "free verse."