Crisis Discourse in Adonis’s Poetry The Cultural Representation of the Dialectic of Destruction and Construction in Songs of Mihyar the Damascene

Abstract

     This study seeks to explore the discourse of crisis in Adonis’s poetry through an analysis of the cultural representation of the binary of destruction and construction in his collection Songs of Mihyar the Damascene, which is considered one of the most significant works in the history of Arab modernism. The collection constitutes a distinctive model for embodying the contemporary Arab civilizational crisis, where Adonis employs the persona of Mihyar al-Dimashqi as a poetic mask to represent the conflict of the self with tradition on the one hand, and with a crisis-ridden cultural reality on the other. The study adopts the cultural criticism approach, supported by textual and semiotic analysis, to investigate how poetic symbols (ruin, ashes, fire, versus light, rebirth, writing) operate in representing the dialectics of crisis. The findings reveal that Adonis does not employ the mask merely as a rhetorical device but as a cultural structure that transcends time and history, reshaping identity within a poetic space that reflects the Arab cultural crisis. Moreover, the study demonstrates that destruction in Adonis’s discourse is not an end in itself, but rather a necessary condition for construction, and that his poetry combines both the aesthetic dimension (the deconstruction of language and rhythm) and the intellectual dimension (the reconfiguration of the relationship between tradition and modernity). This research contributes to enriching the field of cultural criticism in modern Arabic poetry and underscores the role of poetry in questioning established norms and producing alternative visions of identity and meaning