Farouk Gweda: The Realist Romantic

Farouk Gweda, the contemporary poet and journalist (1946) gathers two different schools in his poems very nicely. His elegies hold the qualities of both Romanticism and Realism. As a poet, he looks at the external world from the view point of his own internal world and visualizes human being’s relation with the inner world, spiritualities and sentiments. In addition to this view, as a journalist he looks at the external world outside himself and its current political, social and livelihood issues and introduces human’s position in the present world. In this way, Farouk’s poems are chosen as a base for this study to find out how a poet can intermingle two different schools in his poetry. The present paper studies Romanticism in Farouk Gweda’s poems under the themes of love, pain, dream and hope, and analyzes Realism manifest in the poet’s invitation to revolt and rise in Islamic-Arabic countries, description of nation’s situations, resistance and homeland. After studying these two schools, similar qualities common between these two, that is, use of natural phenomena, are analyzed as well. The research method is descriptive-analytic that emphasizes on various poetical works of Farouk Gweda.