'My Roads Leads to the Dark Bedouin Girl': An Aesthetic Reading of Khalīl Hāwī's The Flute and the Wind

Khalīl Hāwī (1919-82) was one of the most influential modernist Arab poets in the second half of the twentieth century. The main thrust of Hāwī's literary output is steeped in his transcendent vision of Arab national rebirth, a vision which strikingly pervades almost every poem he wrote. While most of Hawī's critics underscore this sense of political commitment and social awareness, the article discusses Hawī's poem The Flute and the Wind ('al-Nāy wa'l-Rīh', 1961) and maintains that a close reading of the poem reveals the poet's acute preoccupation with purely aesthetic aspects - aspects which have to do with the very nature of his poetry and particularly the poetic language and the creative process.