Moreover, the Free Verse poets and the Abbasid mufldathun are not as distant from each other poetically as they are socio- culturally and historically. In fact, the Free Verse poets and their precursors (such as the Apollo and the Diwan groups) were for the most part reacting against the neoclassical project, that is, the qa$"idah of Af:imad ShawqI and his contemporaries, who were trying, on their part, to revive the Abbasid qll$"idah of al-Bul;iturt and Abu Tammiim. In other words, the qll$"idah model against which the twentieth-century modernist movement was reacting and to which it was responding was the Abbasid qll$"idah that was still alive and well, having been resurrected at the hands of the neoclassicists of the nahr,lah, the revivalist movement of the late nineteeth century.