Badr Shakir al-Sayyab

Badr Shakir al Sayyab (Arabic: بدر شاكر السياب‎‎) (December 24, 1926 – 1964) was an Iraqi and Arab poet. Bornهنالواقثن in Jekor, a town south of Basra in Iraq, he was the eldest child of a date grower and shepherd. He graduated from the Higher teachers training college of Baghdad in 1948. Badr Shakir was dismissed from his teaching post for being a member of the Iraqi Communist Party. He is one of the leading Iraqi poets and authors and is very well known and famous for his works throughout all of the Arab world and has been regarded as one of the most influential Arab poets of all time. His works have been translated in more than 10 languages including Arabic, English, Farsi, Somali, Urdu.

Badr Shakir al-Sayyab was one of the greatest poets in Arabic literature, whose experiments helped to change the course of modern Arabic poetry. At the end of the 1940s he launched, with Nazik al-Mala'ika, and shortly followed by ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī and Shathel Taqa, the free verse movement and gave it credibility with the many fine poems he published in the fifties. These included the famous "Rain Song," which was instrumental in drawing attention to the use of myth in poetry. He revolutionized all the elements of the poem and wrote highly involved political and social poetry, along with many personal poems. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was greatly impressed and influenced by the poetry of Badr Shakir al-Sayyab.

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