Elia Abu Madi


Elia Abu Madi was a Lebanese poet.

Early life

Abu Madi was born in the village of Al-Muhaydithah, now part of Bikfaya, Lebanon, on May 15, 1890 to a Christian family. At the age of 11 he moved to Alexandria, Egypt where he worked with his uncle.

Career and Works

In 1911, Elia Abu Madi published his first collection of poems, Tazkar al-Madi. Shortly after, he was exiled by the Ottoman Turkish authorities and he left Egypt for the United States, where he settled in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1916 he moved to New York City and began a career in journalism. In New York Abu Madi met and worked with a number of Arab-American poets including Kahlil Gibran. He married the daughter of Najeeb Diab, editor of the Arabic-language magazine Meraat-ul-Gharb, and became the chief editor of that publication in 1918. His second poetry collection, Diwan Iliya Abu Madi, was published in New York in 1919; his third and most important collection, Al-Jadawil, appeared in 1927. His other books were Al-Khama'il and Tibr wa Turab.
In 1929 Abu Madi founded his own periodical, Al-Samir, in Brooklyn. It began as a monthly but after a few years appeared five times a week.
His poems are very well known among Arabs; poet, author, and journalist Gregory Orfalea wrote that "his poetry is as commonplace and memorized in the Arab world as that of Robert Frost is in ours."
See also a .

Scholarly criticism

  1. Boullata, Issa J. "Iliya Abu Madi and the Riddle of Life in His Poetry" Journal of Arabic Literature, 1986; 17: 69-81.
  2. Nijland, Cornelis. "Religious Motifs and Themes in North American Mahjar Poetry" pp. 161–81 IN: Borg, Gert ; De Moor, Ed ; Representations of the Divine in Arabic Poetry. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi; 2001. 239 pp.
  3. Romy, Cynthia Johnson. Diwan Al-Jadawil of Iliya Abu Madi. Retrieved from