Repetition in the Poetry of Hussein Abdul Latif : A Study in the Aesthetics of the Text

Abstract

Human beings are affected by repetition in one way or another. The movement of the planets is repetitive, the alternation of night and day is a recurring event, and many aspects of human life are marked by repetition. In language, repetition may occur in various forms: it may appear in sentences, words, or letters. It may serve an emphatic function, such as arousing expectation in the recipient or confirming and consolidating meanings; a rhythmic function, by revealing the musical effect in sound patterns; or an ornamental aesthetic purpose that colors and refines the joints of speech. Like other linguistic devices, repetition is commendable when employed with a balance of taste, sound sensibility, and literary culture acquired through the broadening of the writer’s or poet’s linguistic sensibility. However, it may become disruptive and undesirable when it is excessively used in an inappropriate context, becoming a burden on the text and reflecting the poet’s weakness and the decline of his creative imagination.

Repetition is one of the prominent aesthetic devices in Arabic poetry. It deepens meanings, enriches rhythm, and builds the emotional fabric of the text. In the poetry of Hussein Abdul Latif, repetition appears as an artistic technique carrying aesthetic and intellectual dimensions. This calls for an aesthetic analysis of the structure of repetition in his texts—an analysis that links form and content and reveals its aesthetic latent meanings, rhythmic energies, semantic horizons, psychological dimensions, structural architecture, and expressive capacity. This is achieved by identifying the nature of this technique, the manner of its artistic construction and formulation, and the extent to which the poet succeeds in building it as an effective device in his poetic text, along with the rhythm it contains that contributes to enhancing the aesthetics of the text.