A Study of the Literary Style of Homeland Poems by Shair al-Qarawi

Style, in a general lexical sense, refers to the system and rules for expression in a specific literary genre. Literary style is a set of rules and standards that are distinguished by a literary character and that distinguish a literary text (poetry or prose) from other texts. A stylistic study is a systematic study of the structural elements and the way of formulating them to express the ideology of the literary text. Rashid Salim al-Khouri, known as Shair al-Qarawi, is one of the most prominent poets of the Mahjar — a literary movement started by Arabic writers who had emigrated to America at the turn of the twentieth century. His literary style is distinguished by the characteristics of migrant literature and this is clearly reflected in his poetry collection titled Homeland Poems. This paper employs a descriptive-analytical method to study the literary style in al-Khouri’s Homeland Poems; it analyzes different structures in his poetry, such as the lexical structure at its morphological, syntactic, and lexical levels, the musical structure at its internal and external levels, the rhetorical structure with its expressive capacities, and the semantic structure. The results express that Homeland Poems is characterized by employing a deviant style in the superstructures and substructures, and this is the result of the poet’s creative ability. These deviation can be seen in different lexical, semantic, rhetorical, and musical layers of his poetry. Lexical and semantic deviations include employing statements that suggest new meanings to serve the intended purpose musically and semantically. Rhetorical deviations include the use of simile and metaphor to do without traditional images and create new poetic images. Musical deviations include the liberation of the music from the traditional constraints with the re-experience of Andalusian poetry, and the change in the number of poetic syllables that leads to various poetic rythems.