Riflessioni sulla “generazione” dello al-šiʿr al-ḥurr in Iraq, tra romanticismo e post-colonialismo

This study aims at framing the Iraqi “al-šiʿr al-ḥurr” movement in a generational perspective, using Mannheim’s sociological definition of “generation”. Authors such as Nāzik al-Malāʾika and Badr Šākir al-Sayyāb are analysed, with special attention to the common feature they share, notwithstanding their different poetic approach. To fulfil this intent, a selection of their texts on the theme of Nationalism and Panarabism is presented and commented. The way in which labels such as “romanticism”, “modernism” and “post-colonialism” are used by critics to define the two authors are discussed, in order to hypothesize the possibility of going beyond these Western categories to better understand Arab authors’ poetics.