Representing the most sustained investigation of the aesthetics of Anti-Colonialism in modern Arabic poetry, this book chronicles the evolution of a distinct poetics that sought to maintain the integrity of the qaṣīdah without circumventing its historical moment. It painstakingly analyses a selection of odes by four leading twentieth-century poets, Aḥmad Shawqī, Maʿrūf al-Ruṣāfī, Ba…