ديوان علي محمود طه

Ali Mahmoud Taha: One of the great Arab poets in the modern era, and a prominent figure in the romantic trend in poetry, and a member of the Apollo School of Poetry. Ali Mahmoud Taha was born in 1901 in the city of Mansoura, and spent most of his youth there. He belongs to a middle-class family. He began his educational journey by joining writers, like other children of his generation, then moved to the School of Arts and Applied Industries, where he graduated as an architect in 1924 to work as an engineer in the government. For many years, until after that it became easier for him to contact some politicians and join the House of Representatives. Ali Taha lived a comfortable and soft life, in which he enjoyed the pleasures of life. He traveled a lot. He visited a number of European countries, and his poetic horizons opened, and his conscience overflowed. When he visited Venice, he composed the poem “The Song of Gondolas” which made him widely famous, and the great singer Muhammad sang it. Abdel-Wahhab, and later called "the poet of the gondola". Taha occupied a prominent position in poetic circles in the 1940s, following the publication of his first book, The Lost Navigator, in which he was clearly influenced by French romantic poets, especially Lamartine. After that, Taha's collections followed, and he published "Rouls and Ghosts", "East and West", "Flower and Khamr" and others. Ali Mahmoud Taha belongs to the Apollo School of Poetry, which was founded by the poet Ahmed Zaki Abu Shadi, and among the most prominent pioneers of that school were: Ibrahim Naji, Ali Al-Anani, Kamel Kilani, and Jamila Al-Alayli. Taha's poetry is characterized by the idea of ​​romantic individualism, which assumes the availability of material resources to free man from the biological and psychological pressures resulting from material deprivation, and devote himself to contemplation of himself and existence; Because the first tool of romanticism is the imagination, and the imagination requires a measure of human withdrawal from the material world, and all this explains Mahmoud Taha’s tendency to raise aesthetic values, and to sing poetry for the sake of man, freedom and peace. Ali Mahmoud Taha died in 1949 when he was still a young man, as illness did not give him much time, and he is at the peak of his poetic gifts.