Syntactic and Rhetorical Deviation in Badr Shakir al-Sayyab’s Poetry

Syntactic deviation is one of the techniques employed to enhance a literary text, because it derives from the poet’s intentional non-compliance with morphological or syntactic rules to achieve certain goals. Using this technique leads to eloquence of language so that it directs the reader’s attention to the text. Contemporary poets attempt to use this technique in their poetry to inspire the reader with new feelings and, disturbing the usual order of objects, they try to represent them in a brand new way. In this way, the modern Iraqi poet, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab—to whose literary genius contemporary Arabic poetry owes much—has devoted himself to the development of his poetic language and has evoked the reader’s contemplation on his poetry. In some cases, he offers a different language by breaking the norms and moving away from the prevailing principles of poetry. Under the influence of Western culture and literature, he had a critical look at the heritage of Arabic poetry and made a significant contribution to the development of Arabic poetic language. This research tries to examine the syntactic and rhetorical deviations of Sayab’s poems in a descriptive-analytical manner in order to elicit his techniques of defamiliarization and make the reader focus on the poet’s main intention and the hidden layers of his work. The results of the research demonstrate that hyperbaton, omission of letters and the use of new ones, conjunction and separation of words, and using far-fetched words are the most frequent examples of syntactic and rhetorical deviations in Sayyab’s poetry. Therefore, using such techniques, Sayyab gives his poetry a distinctive character so that the reader’s difficulty understanding his new form of expression and their sensual perception time are increased. The research also argues that the syntactic and rhetorical deviation is one of the aesthetic and stylistic qualities of all the free-verse poems of Sayyab.