In emotional literature, the language itself becomes a vivid painting—every word carries color, tone, and movement, creating a vibrant artistic experience

• In emotional literature, we deal with subjective truths as shaped by human sensibility—through imagination, feelings, dimensions, hues, and directions.

If we want to define emotional literature, it encompasses every literary work grounded in a subjective vision of people, events, and the things of the universe and existence. Here, in emotional literature, we deal with subjective truths as shaped by human sensibility—through imagination, feelings, dimensions, hues, and directions. In its magical realm, there is no place for the puzzles and perceptions of external reality, the facts of reason, science, objective measures, or general laws. The sky in emotional literature is not the sky; the sun is not the sun; the night is not the night. They are beings enlivened by the human self, radiating their marvelous lights, personified by literary art into paintings, drawings, statues, and wonderfully crafted words.

This is a simplified definition of the article’s title.

However, if literature is considered a verbal representation of the various theoretical activities of the human mind, in this article we will view it as a verbal representation of practical activity — that is, a verbal image of human action rather than intellectual contemplation and visionary insight into human affairs, works, and the realities of nature and life.

Certainly, literature takes on various types, forms, and purposes. Dr. Michel Assi discusses in his book Art and Literature discusses the essence of emotional literature as well as its types and forms. He says:

If theoretical activity in literature starts, in wisdom, from a level where artistic aesthetic energy and intellectual energy in content and presentation are equal, moving gradually towards diminishing aesthetic artistry as intellectual energy intensifies—reaching its peak with science where aesthetic artistry reaches its lowest limit—then, in contrast, the logic of practical activity in literature also follows an ascending path but in the opposite direction. It begins with theatrical work at a level where aesthetic artistry and intellectual energy are equal, then gradually artistic energy grows while intellectual energy declines, reaching the pinnacle of aesthetic artistic energy in emotional literary works, and intellectual energy sinks to its lowest boundaries.

Thus, emotional literature occupies the apex of artistic quality within the practical activities of literature, whether in the form of poetry or prose. Narrative literature and then theatrical works follow it.

Dr. Michel Assi clarifies the issue of aesthetic artistry in prose or prose poetry, noting that there is a division of opinion regarding them: one group embraces prose poetry, encouraging abandonment of traditional poetic meters, while another insists that poetic expression is only possible in metered verse, warning against what they see as catastrophic consequences otherwise.

In my view, this conceptual confusion stems primarily from the traditional, almost universal, classification of the arts into poetry and prose, and from the absence of this artistic prose style in classical Arabic literature. Due to this, it has become entrenched in people’s minds—based on the realities of ancient poetic works—that emotional lyricism is exclusive to metered poetry alone, not to free prose.

This is how matters have come to us from the past, and how tradition insists on preserving this viewpoint. Scholars and historians of literature and its arts have overlooked the fact that such classification descends from ancient times, when poetic vision truly belonged only to metered verse and not to prose.

This classification remained dominant until the point where aesthetic artistry also became a possibility for prose, as well as for metered speech.

I believe that the classification of literary genres, based solely on the products of thought rather than literature, is not useful in this matter.

Thus, there exists a type of content that characterizes emotional literature—its land is fertile artistic aesthetics primarily, and its sky is the pure poetic launch. Here, poetic quality means artistry in content and presentation, not rhythm or meter. This emotional type can appear in both poetry and prose equally. Therefore, poetic intent is no longer bound by meter and rhyme but is linked to the stance the poet or writer takes toward things—whether it is a subjective, internal, and thus artistic vision, or an objective, factual, and thus intellectual or scientific view. Likewise, prose no longer means unstructured or unmetered speech but has become a stance the writer adopts toward things, expressing them objectively and methodically, without subjectivity or visionary insight.

Purposes of Emotional Literature

Dr. Assi explains that these purposes vary and multiply from one writer to another, depending on each writer’s personal sensitivity, individual experience, or social and natural suffering from era to era and nation to nation. What were the themes of emotional literature in Andalusia, for example, differ from those in Lebanon or elsewhere today and tomorrow. This applies at least to the phenomena of things and emotions.

However, there appears to be an essential core within the human soul that remains relatively constant. For example, emotions of love are eternal and constant in the soul as long as the sexual instinct persists. The essence of love does not change, only the manifestations of relationships between people change. There are also emotions of hatred, envy, hope, doubt, certainty, admiration, and aversion… There is an endless chain of themes and subjects in emotional literature that do not fundamentally change in their psychological essence, though changes may occur slowly and not as quickly as the transformations of appearances and relationships, which are unrelated to the core of the human psyche.

There are also emotions of patriotism, nationalism, dignity, freedom, and individual, family, and social horizons, which the writer views through the windows of his world and conveys to us human impulses, both subjective and personal as well as social positions the writer takes toward existence and society. The lesson in all of this is, first and foremost, aesthetic artistry, which is linked, as we have shown, to historical reality, the directions of life developing within it, its positive active currents, or opposing historical regressive currents. The writer’s stance towards these currents and movements is another measure of artistic literature, alongside the aesthetic standard by which we are accustomed to judge literary artistic works.

However, our old and modern Arabic literary reality, when we scrutinize this literature carefully, remains far in its emotionality from the artistic emotional criteria represented by the masterpieces of European literature, and some early examples of our modern emotional literature. Our emotional heritage, I believe, does not draw sufficiently from the sources of artistry as we have previously understood it, even in the most sincere lyrical works describing poetic qualities and densest aesthetic beauty.

Our emotional heritage in literature remains deficient compared to the modern Arab and foreign creative legacy, especially when considering artistic innovation. This becomes clearer the more I delve into reading this heritage. Perhaps others have noticed and sensed this as clearly. I have often tried hard to find an explanation that satisfies my curiosity and convinces me. Honestly, I hold several different opinions, the essence of which is: the cause of the artistic deficiency in our ancient emotional literature may lie in a lack of personal experience and richness of psychological emotion among past generations of Arab writers.

Emotional experience is nourished by hardship, suffering, and culture, just as intellectual experience is enriched. Perhaps the fact that writers of the Arab renaissance imitated the themes, forms, and styles of pre-Islamic poetry was a cause of this deficiency. Alternatively, the circumstances that forced our ancient writers to always seek livelihood and flatter influential rulers and governors during past historical periods distanced them from the atmosphere of purity and clarity of subjective vision—an atmosphere that is the cornerstone elevating literature to the peak of artistic aesthetic excellence as we know it.

Flattery, artificiality, and falsification feed my criticisms of the modern tastes for this kind of artistic and pure subjective and visionary literature. I told myself, in brief, many things that may all be true, or some of them.

But what remains true in any case is that the familiar ancient Arabic lyricism is not the ideal artistic emotional lyricism that is possible in creative literature in any case, regardless of the direction this literature takes or the language it is written in. It is of its own kind, but it lacks the brilliance of vision, originality, and the radiance of subjectivity.

If we really want to trace the beginnings of artistic emotionality in our modern Arabic literature, we must stop at the works of Khalil Gibran. His works are teeming with vision, where colors and scenes shine vividly; where imagination soars, sensations ignite, and subjectivity overwhelms vision, letters, and words. Around them gather halos of high artistic creativity, which classical literature and its elders rarely experienced except in very rare cases, especially in poetry, and very, very little in prose.

Even Gibran’s stories overflow with subjectivity, giving them a poetic and emotional artistic beauty that is out of place in narrative literature because artistic beauty in storytelling does not rest on emotional subjectivity but on something else: the creation of events and characters realistically and vividly, embodying the atmosphere of the self and evoking its moods and contents.

This study, written by Dr. Michel Assi, states that the themes of emotional lyricism known in ancient Arabic literature, which captivated its poets, were derived from the conditions of ancient Arab life. Pride, praise, satire, elegy, asceticism, apology, and other themes that distinguished Arabic lyrical poetry from other literature had their justifications rooted in the reality of life experienced by Arabs under the influence of tribal and pre-Islamic chauvinism.

Even today, despite changing circumstances and concepts, some of our writers still live only a part of the experience of the contemporary Arab human being. Most emotional literature remains confined to themes of love, women, and nature — essential themes, no doubt, but marginal and partial compared to what the poet’s full self-sensitivity should encompass, including the various existential meanings that a person lives today. This limitation arises from their approach to literature, which is marred by shortcomings, imitation, fear, or duality, leading to a lack of comprehensiveness, originality, and unity between the writer and his literature.

There are new and emergent emotional themes in our modern literature; unfortunately, they still feel foreign and contrived because they do not arise from a genuine individual or collective feeling about these topics. These include themes such as absurdity, anxiety, nausea, and related issues. The story of these themes is well-known and clear: they are connected to a particular ideology whose material foundations are shaken. This ideology is in crisis alongside the political and economic systems that sustained it, and it thrived on the prosperity of its peoples at the expense of social injustice both within the countries that adhere to these systems and beyond.

As for the purposes of our modern emotional literature, they should reflect the concerns of our contemporary human being, who struggles for the spread of good, the dispelling of darkness, and the flourishing of life. These are the purposes of the social self—our social self—in its stance toward life’s issues and its interactions with them. They include authentic love, honorable patriotism, the striving for dignity and nationalism, and also the purposes related to the failures that people face in these aspirations, this love, and this life.

Forms of Emotional Literature

The fundamental form of this type of literature is the poem or the essay, due to its brevity and because it cannot tolerate otherness, imitation, or objectivity. Whether the poem or essay is recorded in a book, published in a newspaper, broadcast on the radio, or disseminated by other means of communication and publication, its style is always the style of colorful imagery and expression. The style harmonizes with its content, breathes with its spirit, and moves with its artistic flow. Here we stand at the peak of aesthetic artistry, facing words that live at the level of the fine arts, in their purest subjective form and their visionary realities.

In emotional literature, the language itself becomes a vivid painting—every word carries color, tone, and movement, creating a vibrant artistic experience. This literature does not just communicate ideas or stories; it evokes emotions and subjective experiences through its form and style. Thus, the emotional literary work is a work of fine art, where the aesthetic and expressive aspects are inseparable from the content.

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Published under International Cooperation with "Sindh Courier"