Baghdad City in Poetry: Fabled Metropolis Valorized and Elegized

Amongst the return to ruin ravaging Baghdad, its poets lamented the fall from utopian bliss to dystopia with their words representing a pained spatiality and reckoning with character-altering devastation. There is a love of place as it suffers human vices, one of the complexities of representation. Within these poeticisms are numerous historiographies. Earlier poets such as Muti ibn Iyas and Abd Allah ibn Al-Mubarak capture the urban majesty igniting the imagination. Yet it inspired contradictory emotions. Time ensured that, as destruction defined space, the poet crossed the threshold in the subject-object interaction. Those like Sa'di Shirazi, elegizing the ghostly capital after the 1258 Mongol invasion, was broken himself with his rhythmic cadence reflecting a hemorrhaging mentality. When violence invades the poetics of creation, some like Abdulghani Al-Jamil strip language of an embellished exterior. It is a desire to resist. Woundedness speaks back to the city uncovering a spatiality of loss.