Badr Shakir al Sayyab was a leading Iraqi poet, well known throughout the Arab world and one of the most influential Arab poets of all time. His works have been translated in more than 10 languages including English, Persian, Somali and Urdu.
He was born in Jaykur, a town south of Basra, the eldest child of a date grower and shepherd. He graduated from the Higher Teacher Training College of Baghdad in 1948 but was later dismissed from his teaching post for being a member of the Iraqi Communist Party.
Badr Shakir al-Sayyab's experiments helped to change the course of modern Arabic poetry. He produced seven collections of poetry and several translations, which include the poetry of Louis Aragon, Nazim Hikmet, and Edith Sitwell, who, with T. S. Eliot, had a profound influence on him. At the end of the 1940s he launched the free verse movement in Arabic poetry, with Nazik al-Mala'ika, Abd al-Wahhab Al-Bayati and Shathel Taqa, giving it credibility with the many fine poems he published in the fifties. The publication of his third volume, Rain Song, in 1960 was one of the most significant events in contemporary Arabic poetry, instrumental in drawing attention to the use of myth in poetry. He revolutionized every element of the poem and wrote on highly involved political and social topics, as well as many personal themes. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was greatly impressed and influenced by the poetry of Badr Shakir al-Sayyab.
.jpg)