Nature and Craftsmanship in Our Ancient Poetry from Criticism Perspective, in the Past and Present

Abstract

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The issue of printing and craft is one of the ancient critical and rhetorical concepts, which accompanied the process of poetic creativity and tried to define its features and control its foundations, besides, it became the means and purpose of criticism in judging poetry in terms of quality and mediocrity in distinguishing the good poet from the other. This issue had a special place among ancient critics and modernists. Each of these critics had a special point of view on the issue. These critics tried to find criteria for criticism of poetry, so they called the printed one who came with easy poetry free from education and workmanship, that is, the one who comes free from the mind without trouble and fatigue in poetic language. There were many studies that referred to that issue, but it remained dissonant and brief, and did not reach the desired goal. While looking at the ancient and modern critical books, we note that they dealt with this issue in all brevity, and among these books, Al-Omda by Ibn Rashiq, Al-Bayan and Al-Tibween by Al-Jahiz, and the characteristics by Ibn Jinni. ,  and given the importance of this topic in ancient and modern Arabic criticism, knowing good poetry from other, and distinguishing poets among them, my choice fell on this topic, i.e. printing and workmanship from the perspective of ancient and modern criticism, and I relied on the historical method in writing the research. The research is divided into an introduction, and two other sections, and in each topic, the preface talked about the concept of the issue and the definition of printing and craft, linguistically and idiomatically. In the first section, I dealt with the most important opinions of the old critics in printing and craftsmanship, namely Al-Asma'i, Al-Jahiz, Ibn Qutaiba, Al-Amdi, Abu Hilal, and Ibn Rashiq, and how the opinions differed among some and were similar to others. As for the second section: I tried to list some of the opinions of the modernists and their objections to the issue, among them Shawqi Dhaif, who believes that the doctrine of craftsmanship depends on elegance in artistic expression and tendency to decoration, and Mustafa Sadiq al-Rafi’i and how he tries to differentiate between two types of craftsmanship, that is, poetic craft among the pre-Islamic and craftsmanship at both births, and the opinion of Muhammad Mustafa, and Ahmad Badawi, as well as concluded the research with a number of results.