Adonis, the Poet Who ‘Ruined Arabic Poetry’

While his name is unfamiliar in the US, in the Arab world he “is a renowned figure, if not everywhere a beloved one. He is an outspoken secularist … and a poetic revolutionary of sorts who has tried to liberate Arabic verse from its traditional forms and subject matter. Some of his poems are immensely long and immensely difficult and resemble Pound’s Cantos at their most impenetrable.”