The Poetry of Ameen Rihani

Ameen Rihani wrote as a man with a foot in two worlds, born in the mountains of Lebanon and raised in the streets of New York, and his poems try to hold both together. Working mostly in free verse, with Walt Whitman clearly in his ear, he reaches toward a mysticism that treats the great religions as different roads to one truth. The poems move between the deserts and shrines of the East and the restless modern West, praising nature, the divine, and the human brotherhood he hoped might join them. His best known English collection, A Chant of Mystics, sits at the heart of this gathering. Alongside his prose and his work as a translator, the verse marks him as a pioneer of Arab-American writing. Available free as a PDF and EPUB edition.