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Adonis, Arabic Adūnīs, pseudonym of ʿAlī Aḥmad Saʿīd Isbar, (born 1930, Qaṣṣābīn, near Latakia, Syria), Syrian-born Lebanese poet and literary critic who was a leader of the modernist movement in contemporary Arabic poetry.

Adonis was born into a family of farmers and had no formal education until he was in his teens, though his father taught him much about classical Arabic literature. At age 14 he was enrolled in a French-run high school. He published his first volume of poems, Dalīlah, in 1950 and received a degree in philosophy at the University of Damascus in 1954. The following year he was imprisoned for six months because of his political views and activities. Adonis then moved to Beirut, where in 1957 he helped Yūsuf al-Khāl found the avant-garde poetry review Shiʿr ("Poetry"), and later became a citizen of Lebanon. Among his early volumes of poetry are Qasāʾid ūlā (1956; "First Poems") and Awrāq fī al-rīḥ (1958; "Leaves in the Wind").

In the 1960s Adonis helped create a new form of Arabic poetry-one characterized by elevated diction and a form of complex Surrealism influenced by the work of Sufi poets-with the publication of such works as Aghānī Mihyār al-Dimashqī (1961; Mihyar of Damascus: His Songs), Kitāb al-taḥawwulāt wa al-hijrah fī aqālīm al-nahār wa al-layl (1965; "The Book of Metamorphosis and Migration in the Regions of Day and Night") and Al-Masraḥ wa al-marāyā (1968; "The Stage and the Mirrors"). His later book Al-Sūfiyyah wa al-Suriyāliyyah (1995; Sufism and Surrealism) is an examination of the similarities between the two movements that inspired him. In 1968 he launched the radical journal Mawāqif ("Positions"), which expanded its scope beyond literature to include political and cultural commentary. He also wrote innovative prose poems such as the influential Qabr min ajl New York (1971; "A Tomb for New York").

In 1973 Adonis received a Ph.D. from St. Joseph University in Beirut, after which he held faculty positions at various universities before settling in Paris in the mid-1980s. Adonis's Al-Kitāb (1995; "The Book"), which echoes the name of the Qurʾān, is a structurally complex work exploring Arab history from multiple perspectives. His critical essays were collected in Zaman al-Shiʿr (1972; "The Time for Poetry") and Al-Thābit wa al-mutaḥawwil (1974; "Stability and Change"). He also wrote Muqaddimah li al-shiʿr al-ʿArabī (1979; An Introduction to Arab Poetics). English translations of selected poems appear in The Blood of Adonis (1971), The Transformation of the Lover (1983), The Pages of Day and Night (1994), and A Time Between Ashes and Roses (2004).

Adonis was the recipient of numerous honours, including the Goethe Prize (2011; Germany) and the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature (2017; United States).

Amy Tikkanen.

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This article was most recently revised and updated by Adonis, Arabic Adūnīs, pseudonym of ʿAlī Aḥmad Saʿīd Isbar, (born 1930, Qaṣṣābīn, near Latakia, Syria), Syrian-born Lebanese poet and literary critic who was a leader of the modernist movement in contemporary Arabic poetry.

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Arab poet, translator, editor, and theorist Ali Ahmad Said Esber was the eldest of six children born to a family of farmers in Syria's Al Qassabin village. Though they could not afford the cost of formal education, Adonis's father taught his son to read and helped him memorize poems while he worked on the family farm. At fourteen, Adonis recited a poem to the president of Syria during his visit a neighboring town, after which the president offered to grant the boy's request to attend school. With the president's support, Adonis enrolled in a French high school and then Damascus University, where he earned a BA in philosophy.

In his late teens, he began writing under the name Adonis, after the Greek god of fertility. After a year in prison as a result of his political activity, Adonis moved to Beirut, where he found a rich community of expatriate writers and artists. There he cofounded and edited two progressive literary journals, Sh'ir and Mawaqif, and earned a PhD at St. Joseph University.

Breaking with the tradition of formal structure in Arabic poetry, Adonis experiments with free verse, variable meters, and prose poetry as he engages themes of exile and transformation, in a voice at once playful and prophetic. In a 2010 interview with Charles McGrath for the New York Times, Adonis stated, "I wanted to draw on Arab tradition and mythology without being tied to it," adding, "I wanted to break the linearity of poetic text - to mess with it, if you will. The poem is meant to be a network rather than a single rope of thought." Publishers Weekly described Adonis' collection Mihyar of Damascus: His Songs as a "seminal, startling, volatile, founding work of Arabic-language modernism."

Adonis is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Adonis: Selected Poems (2010, translated by Khaled Mattawa), Mihyar of Damascus: His Songs (2008), If Only the Sea Could Sleep (2002), and The Blood of Adonis (1971), which won the International Poetry Forum's Syria-Lebanon Award. Adonis is also the author of the seminal work An Introduction to Arab Poetics (2003).

Adonis has won the first ever International Nâzim Hikmet Poetry Award, the Norwegian Academy for Literature and Freedom of Expression's Bjørnson Prize, the Highest Award of the International Poem Biennial in Brussels, and the Syria-Lebanon Best Poet Award. In 1983 he was elected into the Stéphané Mallarmé Academy.

Adonis has taught at the Sorbonne, Damascus University, and the Lebanese University. He lives in Paris.

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Arab poet, translator, editor, and theorist Ali Ahmad Said Esber was the eldest of six children born to a family of farmers in Syria's Al Qassabin village. Though they could not afford the cost of formal education, Adonis's father taught his son to read and helped him memorize poems while he worked...

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In March, 2011, when civil protests broke out in cities and towns across Syria, the country's most famous poet, Adonis-who is in his eighties and has lived in exile since the mid-nineteen-fifties-hesitated to support the demonstrators. Although he had welcomed earlier uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, he flinched when Syria's turn came. In an editorial published in , a leading Arabic newspaper, in May, 2011, by which time more than a thousand protesters were dead and government tanks had shelled several towns, Adonis wrote, "I will never agree to participate in a demonstration that comes out of a mosque." He portrayed the opposition as young naïfs, easily coöpted by canny Islamists who dreamed of establishing a religious authoritarianism that would be even worse than the Baathist regime of Bashar al-Assad.

Adonis's assessment of the demonstrators echoed the rhetoric coming from the regime, and many readers were dismayed. For the past sixty years, he has tirelessly called for radical change in every sphere of Arab life, and he is the author of some of the most revolutionary poems in Arabic. Sadiq Jalal al-'Azm, an eminent philosopher at the University of Damascus, was bewildered that Adonis, "the man of freedom, transformation, revolution, progress, and modernity," should "disparage if not condemn the Syrian revolution from its outset." But for Adonis the Syrian uprising was no revolution. In a recent interview in French (he has lived in Paris since the mid-nineteen-eighties), he claimed, "It is impossible, in a society like Arab society, to make a revolution unless it is founded on the principle of laïcité "-the French term for a stringent secularism. Long before the emergence of the Islamic State's caliphate, Adonis warned that the alliance of theology with state power was the region's most deep-rooted danger.

Adonis's long poem " Concerto al-Quds," published in Arabic in 2012 and now available in an English translation by Khaled Mattawa (Yale), is the poet's secularist summa, a condemnation of monotheism couched in the form of a surrealist montage. Its subject is Jerusalem-al-Quds, in Arabic-the spiritual center for all three monotheistic faiths and the site of their most apocalyptic imaginings. In the Islamic tradition, Jerusalem was the first qibla (the direction faced in prayer), the starting point of the Prophet Muhammad's trip to the heavens ( al-mi'raj), and also the place where the archangel Israfil will blow his trumpet on the Day of Resurrection. In Judaism, the city is the site of the First and Second Temples, both destroyed, and the envisaged site of a third. In the Book of Revelation, John beholds a "new Jerusalem" descending from the heavens and hears a voice describing the life to come: "And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away."

The actual Jerusalem is rather different, of course-a city riven by sectarian conflict, coarsened by tourism, marred by the building of settlements and walls, and by the scars of occupation. This discrepancy between ideal and reality is the premise of Adonis's poem, in which the heavenly archetype hovers like a mirage above the degraded modern city. The poem begins:

Up there, up above,
look at her dangling from the sky's throat.
Look at her fenced with the eyelashes of angels.

No one can walk toward her,
but a man can crawl on his forehead and shoulders,
perhaps even his navel.

Barefoot, knock on her door.
A prophet will open, and teach you how to march, and how to bow.

Like many of Adonis's long poems, "Concerto al-Quds" is a bric-a-brac construction, stuffed with quotations from medieval sources-particularly Arab historians of Jerusalem-and also from religious texts and modern fiction. Verse alternates with prose, and, occasionally, the poem becomes a textual net, with fragments of phrases spaced over the page in the manner of Mallarmé (one of Adonis's chief influences). The musical allusion in the work's title suggests that the assembled citations are meant as background for the dissonant solos of the poet's own voice. While the orchestral parts sustain the celestial myth of Jerusalem, Adonis insists on its earthly history. He quotes a prophetic Hadith that says, "Whoever wants to see a spot of heaven, let him gaze at al-Quds," but his Jerusalem is "a divine cage," a wasteland of barbed wire and demolished homes, where "corpses and severed limbs" lie strewn atop the rubble. The poem isn't a lament for a lost paradise but an indictment of the idea that some places on earth are more holy than others.

Adonis, whose given name is 'Ali Ahmad Said Esber, was born in 1930, in the village of Qassabin, south of Latakia, in northwest Syria. His family is Alawite, but Adonis has never claimed a sectarian identity. As a teen-ager, he joined the Social Syrian Nationalist Party, which was a rival to the pan-Arab Baath Party, though the two shared a secularist ideology. The charismatic leader of the S.S.N.P., a Greek Orthodox Christian named Antun Sa'ada, called for the revival of what he termed "Greater Syria," a territory comprising Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine. For Sa'ada and his followers, Syria was a Mediterranean nation. Arab Muslims were only the most recent stratum of a civilization with its foundations in Near Eastern myth. 'Ali Ahmad adopted the pen name Adonis in the late forties, after the Greek-Phoenician vegetal deity of death and resurrection. He published a number of poems-virtuoso pieces of rhetoric, for a poet in his late teens-on the theme of Syrian national rebirth. The new name signalled Adonis's embrace of a layered, Mediterranean identity (the Greeks believed that Adonis was a son of the Assyrian king Theias) and his rejection of any narrowly Arab sense of belonging.

Adonis fled Syria for Lebanon in 1956. He had spent the previous year in prison-"a year of torture, a true hell," he later called it-after a S.S.N.P. militant assassinated a Syrian Army officer, leading to a roundup of Party members. In Beirut, Adonis did his best to slough off his political past and reinvent himself as an avant-garde poet. As he later wrote in a memoir of the period, Beirut was, for him, "a city of beginnings." In the decade following the Second World War, the Lebanese capital had emerged as the center of Arabic intellectual life, usurping the position previously held by Cairo. Lebanon was the banker of choice for the newly oil-rich Gulf States; tourists flocked to its deluxe hotels and bikini-crowded beaches; and, amid the rise of monolithic, one-party states, disaffected thinkers from across the region came to take advantage of its liberal censorship laws.

In 1957, Adonis helped establish the quarterly Shi'r, a flamboyantly cosmopolitan magazine, whose name was borrowed from the American magazine Poetry. Shi'r became a tribune for modernist poetry in Arabic. From his perch there, Adonis wrote manifestos in favor of the prose poem-a radical stance at the time, since almost all poetry in Arabic, from the pre-Islamic period onward, had been composed in fixed metres. Shi'r published Arabic translations of European poets, including W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot; Adonis himself translated works by Paul Claudel, Saint-John Perse, and Yves Bonnefoy.

It was during his early years in Beirut that Adonis turned away from nationalist-themed verse and began writing the poems that were to make him the most revered and controversial poet in the Middle East. His 1961 book, "Aghani Mihyar al-Dimashqi" (translated into English, by Adnan Hadar and Michael Beard, as " Mihyar of Damascus: His Songs "), is widely regarded as his best. Mihyar, the hero of the collection, is a figure of mythic proportions, an exile who roams through a blighted landscape and trumpets a new creed-indeed, a creed of the New. Adonis's language casts a liturgical spell:

Here he comes from under the ruins
in the climate of new words,

offering his poems to grieving winds
unpolished but bewitching like brass.

He is a language glistening between the masts,
he is the knight of strange words.

For some readers, Mihyar's alienation from his native environment-his strange words and his affinity for Mediterranean masts-reads as a provocation. Arab nationalists, in particular, accused Adonis and his Shi'r colleagues (several of whom were also ex-S.S.N.P.) of ignoring their own literary tradition. For such critics, anxious to safeguard the "unity" of Arabic culture, imported forms like the prose poem were the beachheads of a neo-imperialist invasion. It didn't help that Adonis and many of his colleagues came from minority backgrounds-precisely the communities that European powers historically sought out as allies. Nazik al-Mala'ika, a prominent Iraqi poet, called Shi'r a magazine "in Beirut in the Arabic language with a European spirit."

Adonis made it his mission to show his critics how little they knew of the heritage they claimed to defend. He spent the next dozen years immersed in the corpus of Arabic poetry, philosophy, and jurisprudence. The result was a pair of encyclopedic endeavors: the three-volume " Anthology of Arabic Poetry " (1964-68), which included poems from the sixth to the nineteenth centuries, and a four-volume work of historical criticism, "The Fixed and the Transformative" (1974). In both works, Adonis claimed to discover a "modernist" counter-heritage buried within the classical heritage itself. In the writings of Abbasid poets, Sufi sheikhs, Shiite divines, and Andalusian philosophers, he found a tradition of dissenters who thumbed their noses at the orthodoxy. Here was proof that there was no such thing as a unified tradition. Instead, there were many pasts within the past, and some that might be useful in the present.

In 1975, the outbreak of civil conflict in Lebanon put an end to Beirut's Belle Époque. The war pitted Muslim, Christian, and Druze communities against one another, and outside powers soon swooped in. The Lebanese capital became synonymous with violent fanaticism rather than with intellectual openness. Intellectuals who had sought refuge there now looked for new homes. In 1985, the year he left for Paris, Adonis published "The Book of Siege," a bitterly valedictory poem for his home of three decades. In its evocation of a city transformed by sectarian violence, it foreshadows his later poem about Jerusalem:

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In March, 2011, when civil protests broke out in cities and towns across Syria, the country's most famous poet, Adonis-who is in his eighties and has lived in exile since the mid-nineteen-fifties-hesitated to support the demonstrators. Although he had welcomed earlier uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, he flinched when Syria's turn came.

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The Beginning of Speech by Adonis | Poetry Foundation

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leaning for the first time

on the mind's pillow.

I was talking to my body then

I wrote in red.

Red is the sun's most beautiful throne

worship on red rugs.

Night is another candle.

a message carried in space

echoed by the body of the wind.

The sun insists on dressing itself in fog

Am I being scolded by the light?

they used to walk in their sleep

and I used to lean on them.

Love and dreams are two parentheses.

Between them I place my body

and discover the world.

I saw the air fly with two grass feet

and the road dance with feet made of air.

that wounds made me.

who still walks inside me.

Now he stands at a staircase made of light

searching for a corner to rest in

and to read the face of night again.

If the moon were a house,

my feet would refuse to touch its doorstep.

carrying me to the air of seasons.

the other caressing tresses

a pebble in the field of space.

who is joined to the horizon

can build new roads.

and light is his walking stick.

What shall I say to the body I abandoned

in the rubble of the house

in which I was born?

No one can narrate my childhood

except those stars that flicker above it

and that leave footprints

on the evening's path.

being born in the palms of a light

and who names me.

Out of that river he made a mirror

and asked it about his sorrow.

He made rain out of his grief

and imitated the clouds.

Your childhood is a village.

You will never cross its boundaries

no matter how far you go.

his memories floating bodies.

from the mountains of the past,

how can you climb them again,

small and secretive like a womb.

I never left it.

I love the ocean not the shores.

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Celebrating Childhood by Adonis | Poetry Foundation

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leaning for the first time on the mind's pillow. I was talking to my body then I wrote in red. Red is the sun's most beautiful throne worship on red rugs. Night is another candle. a message carried in space echoed by the body of the wind.

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The cities dissolve, and the earth is a cart loaded with dust

Only poetry knows how to pair itself to this space.

No road to this house, a siege,

and his house is graveyard.

From a distance, above his house

from threads of dust.

I said: this is the way home, he said: No

you can't pass, and aimed his bullet at me.

Very well then, friends and their homes

in all of Beirut's are my companions.

Blood about which a boy talked

whispered to his friends:

nothing remains in the sky now

except holes called "stars."

The city's voice was too tender, even the winds

would not tune its strings-

like a child arranging his dreams for nightfall

bidding the morning to sit beside him on his chair.

They found people in bags:

a person without a head

a person without hands, or tongue

a person choked to death

and the rest had no shapes and no names.

don't write about these things.

bombs mirror themselves inside of it

prophecies and dust-proverbs mirror themselves inside of it

cloisters mirror themselves inside of it, a carpet made of the alphabet

disentangles thread by thread

falls on the face of the city, slipping out of the needles of memory.

A murderer in the city's air, swimming through its wound-

that trembled to its name-to the hemorrhage of its name

and all that surrounds us-

houses left their walls behind

and I am no longer I.

Maybe there will come a time in which you'll accept

to live deaf and mute, maybe

they'll allow you to mumble: death

and peace unto you.

From the wine of the palms to the quiet of the desert . . . et cetera

from a morning that smuggles its own intestines

and sleeps on the corpses of the rebels . . . et cetera

from soldiers, armies . . . et cetera

from the shadows of men and women . . . et cetera

from bombs hidden in the prayers of monotheists and infidels . . . et cetera

from iron that oozes iron and bleeds flesh . . . et cetera

from fields that long for wheat, and grass and working hands . . . et cetera

from forts that wall our bodies

and heap darkness upon us . . . et cetera

from legends of the dead who pronounce life, who steer our life . . . et cetera

from talk that is slaughter and slaughter and slitters of throats . . . et cetera

from darkness to darkness to darkness

I breathe, touch my body, search for myself

and for you, and for him, and for the others

between my face and this hemorrhage of talk . . . et cetera

reach out your hand toward him

there is no country there.

Murder has changed the city's shape-this stone

and this smoke is exhaled from human lungs.

Each thing recites its exile . . . a sea

do you expect on these mornings except their arteries set to sail

into the darkness, into the tidal wave of slaughter?

Stay up with her, don't let up-

she sits death in her embrace

tattered sheets of paper.

she is tossing and turning in the sand

are the spots of human moans.

Seed after seed are cast into our earth-

fields feeding on our legends,

guard the secret of these bloods.

I am talking about a flavor to the seasons

and a flash of lightning in the sky.

Tower Square-(an engraving whispers its secrets

to bombed-out bridges . . . )

Tower Square-(a memory seeks its shape

among dust and fire . . . )

Tower Square-(an open desert

chosen by winds and vomited . . . by them . . . )

Tower Square-(It's magical

to see corpses move/their limbs

in one alleyway, and their ghosts

in another/and to hear their sighs . . . )

Tower Square-(West and East

martyrs, commands . . . )

and spices that launch the festival . . . )

Tower Square-(let go of time . . .

is this the face of Beirut?

a bell, or a scream?

Did you travel? Have you returned? What's new with you?

-A neighbor got killed . . . /

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

-Your dice are on a streak.

-Oh, just a coincidence /

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

and talk dragging more talk.

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The cities dissolve, and the earth is a cart loaded with dust Only poetry knows how to pair itself to this space. No road to this house, a siege, and his house is graveyard. From a distance, above his house from threads of dust.

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The leaves asleep under the wind

and the ages collapsed on top of each other

and the trees rising out of our eyelashes

are the wound's lake.

The wound is to be found on bridges

where the grave lengthens

and patience goes on to no end

between the shores of our love and death.

and the wound is a crossing too.

To the language choked by tolling bells

I offer the voice of the wound.

To the stone coming from afar

to the dried-up world crumbling to dust

to the time ferried on creaky sleighs

I light up the fire of the wound.

And when history burns inside my clothes

and when blue nails grow inside my books,

"Who are you, who tosses you

And inside my book and on my virgin land

I stare into a pair of eyes made of dust.

"I am the wound that is born

and grows as your history grows."

wound of the parting dove.

I named you book and quill

and here I begin the dialogue

between me and the ancient tongue

in the archipelago of the ancient fall.

And here I teach these words

to the wind and the palms,

O wound of the parting dove.

If I had a harbor in the land

of dreams and mirrors, if I had a ship,

of a city, if I had a city

in the land of children and weeping,

I would have written all this down for the wound's sake,

that penetrates trees, stone, and sky,

unbridled, startling like conquest.

O world adorned with dream and longing.

Pour down, and shake us, we, the palms of the wound,

tear out branches from trees that love the silence of the wound,

that lie awake staring at its pointed eyelashes and soft hands.

World adorned with dream and longing

world that falls on my brow

like the lash of a wound,

don't come close-the wound is closer-

don't tempt me-the wound is more beautiful.

That magic that your eyes had flung

the wound has passed over it,

passed and did not leave a single sail

to tempt toward salvation, did not leave

a single island behind.

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The leaves asleep under the wind and the ages collapsed on top of each other and the trees rising out of our eyelashes are the wound's lake. The wound is to be found on bridges where the grave lengthens and patience goes on to no end between the shores of our love and death.

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Adonis: The Most Daring and Provocative Arab Poet

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“A visionary who has profound respect for the past, Adonis has articulated his cherished themes of identity, memory, and exile in achingly beautiful verse.”

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Adonis, the greatest living poet of the Arab world, ushers me down a labyrinthine corridor in a stately building in Paris, near the Champs Elysées. The plush offices belong to a benefactor, a Syrian-born businessman funding the poet's latest venture - a cultural journal in Arabic, which he edits. Fetching a bulky manuscript of the imminent third issue of the Other, Adonis hefts it excitedly on to a coffee table, listing the contributors "from west and east", many of them of his grandchildren's generation. He turned 82 this month. His eyes spark: "We want new talents with new ideas."

A Syrian-born poet, critic and essayist, and a staunch secularist who sees himself as a "pagan prophet", Adonis has been writing poetry for 70 years. He led a modernist revolution in the second half of the 20th century, exerting a seismic influence on Arabic poetry comparable to TS Eliot's in the anglophone world. Aged 17, he adopted the name of the Greek fertility god (pronounced Adon-ees, with the stress on the last syllable) to alert napping editors to his precocious talent and his pre-Islamic, pan-Mediterranean muses. Since the death of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish in 2008, it would be hard to argue for a poet of greater stature in a literary culture where poetry is the most prestigious form as well as being popular.

He moved to Paris in 1985, and was named a commander of France's Order of Arts and Letters in 1997. Last year he was the first Arab writer to win the Goethe prize in Germany, and each autumn is credibly tipped for the Nobel in literature - the only Arab recipient of which to date was the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz in 1988. Though Adonis was Ladbroke's favourite in the year of the Arab spring, he does not begrudge the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer his laurels, having introduced him to audiences on a tour of Arab countries. When the uprisings began in Tunisia and Egypt last year, he wrote "little poems to express my joy and happiness". Yet joy gave way to caution, and warnings of tragedy. "It's the Arab youth that created this spring, and it's the first time Arabs are not imitating the west - it's extraordinary," he says. "But despite this, it's the Islamists and merchants and Americans who have picked the fruits of this revolutionary moment." His reservations sparked impatience and were widely attacked: Sinan Antoon, an Iraqi poet, novelist and assistant professor at New York University, claimed that the Arab spring has "consigned Adonis, the self-proclaimed revolutionary, to irrelevance".

There is, Adonis says, a "tendency for poets and painters in the Arab world to be politically engaged. There's a lot to fight for: for human rights and the Palestinians; and against colonialism, Arab despotism and closed thinking among fundamentalists. I'm not against this engagement, or against them - but I'm not like them. A creator always has to be with what's revolutionary, but he should never be like the revolutionaries. He can't speak the same language or work in the same political environment." He adds that he is "radically against the use of violence - I'm with Gandhi, not Guevara."

Like VS Naipaul, a friend who has praised him as a "master of our times", Adonis can be a contrarian, though he lacks Naipaul's acidity and irrascibility. For critics, some of his pronouncements on the "extinction" of Arab culture, or the "Arab mind", have an orientalist taint. Yet his translator Khaled Mattawa, an Arab American poet, sees it as measured iconoclasm: "He's been unsparing against the deeply rooted forces of intolerance in Arab thought, but also celebratory of regenerative streaks in Arab culture."

Although English translations of his poetry have lagged behind French, in the past decade there have been five collections: Mattawa's Adonis: Selected Poems won the Saif Ghobash-Banipal prize for Arabic translation. Adonis will be coming to London for the award ceremony next month, and also to take part in a two-month celebration of his work, "A Tribute to Adonis", at West London's Mosaic Rooms starting on February 3, which includes an exhibition of the poet's recent art works. He began making small collages using Arabic calligraphy 10 years ago, during a listless period of poet's block, and friends suggested he exhibit them. "I found another way to express my relation to things, other than the word." He uses parchments and rags, "bits and pieces of nothing, thrown away. I rarely use colour; I prefer ripped things," adding fragments of his own poems, as well as classical Arabic poetry "as a homage".

Last June, amid the bloody crackdown on the Syrian uprising, Adonis wrote an open letter to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in the Lebanese newspaper al-Safir - "as a citizen," he stresses. Describing Syria as a brutal police state, he attacked the ruling Ba'ath party, called on the president to step down, and warned that "you cannot imprison an entire nation". He was none the less taken to task for addressing a tyrant as an elected president, and criticising the "violent tendencies" of some of his opponents. "That's why I said I'm not like the revolutionaries," he says. "I'm with them, but I don't speak the same language. They're like school teachers telling you how to speak, and to repeat the same words. Whereas I left Syria in 1956 and I've been in conflict with it for more than 50 years. I've never met either Assad [Bashar or his father, Hafez]. I was among the first to criticise the Ba'ath party, because I'm against an ideology based on a singleness of ideas.

"What's really absurd is that the Arab opposition to dictators refuses any critique; it's a vicious circle. So someone who is against despotism in all its forms can't be either with the regime or with those who call themselves its opponents. The opposition is a regime avant la lettre." He adds: "In our tradition, unfortunately, everything is based on unity - the oneness of God, of politics, of the people. We can't ever arrive at democracy with this mentality, because democracy is based on understanding the other as different. You can't think you hold the truth, and that nobody else has it."

His mother, aged 107, still lives in Syria. For 20 years after he left the country (when released from a year's imprisonment for membership of an opposition party), he was unable to see her. From 1976, he visited each year until two years ago, when "friends said it might be dangerous". But he is adamant that family circumstances have "never stopped me from saying what I think". Of those who accuse him of tardiness or equivocation in condemning the Syrian regime, he says wearily: "I've written many articles - I have a book of them coming out that's 200 pages long. These people don't read."

He lives on the outskirts of Paris, beyond la Défense, with his wife, Khalida Said, a literary critic. "For me she's a great critic, one of the best. Sometimes we agree, sometimes we disagree." They have two daughters: Arwad, who is director of the House of World Cultures in Paris; and Ninar, an artist who moves between Paris and Beirut. Adonis shows little sign of having just spent seven months in Lebanon convalescing from two major operations. Before that, he had announced his retirement from poetry. It was while writing a long poem against monotheism, "Concerto for Jerusalem". "Jerusalem is a city of three monotheistic religions," he says. "If there's one God, it should be beautiful. Instead, it's the most inhuman city in the world. I said I was stopping poetry as an act of defiance." But alluding to his muses, he laughs: "The pre-monotheistic goddesses didn't let me retire."

He was born Ali Ahmad Said Esber in 1930, in Qassabin in western Syria, a "poor village isolated in the mountains". His parents were farmers, and he had no early formal schooling. "I'd never seen a car, electricity or a telephone till I was 13. I always ask myself how I was transformed into this other person; it was almost miraculous." His love of poetry was nurtured by his father, and at Qur'anic school. Aged 13, when he impressed the president of the newly established Syrian republic by reciting one of his own poems, his reward was a scholarship to the French lycée. He studied philosophy at Damascus university, and later did a doctorate in Lebanon.

During a year in Paris in 1960, he found his voice in the poem Mihyar of Damascus: His Song (1961), with echoes of Noah, Adam, Ulysses and Orpheus. While for him, poetry and religion are rivals, Sufi mysticism is a force for renewal. Sufism and Surrealism - the title of his 1995 book - are united in the idea, as he expressed it in a poem, that reality is "nothing but skin that crumbles as soon as you touch it". He is also drawn to a mystical view that identity is not fixed: "A human being creates his identity in creating his oeuvre." Yet Sufism is more profound than surrealism or existentialism, he says, "because it's related to a revolutionary idea - that the other is me; that I am the other. If I travel towards myself, I must go through the other."

This is no philosophical nicety. His family belonged to the Shia minority Alawites, and it is sometimes suggested that this gives him his sense of being apart. "It's not being Alawite that gives me a sense of difference," he objects, "but the present state of the Arab world. A man isn't Protestant, Catholic, Sunni or Shia by birth; it's through projects and pathways that men become Shia or Alawite. I never subscribed to that." He joined the secular Syrian Social Nationalist party, opposed to the colonisation and partition of Syria, "partly to get out of concepts of minorities and majorities". He was duly jailed during his military service in the mid-1950s. Since he quit the party in 1960, he has never belonged to another. "I was only 14 or 15 when I joined - a child. Later, I said I can't be both poet and politically engaged. Ideology is against art."

Beirut, where he fled with his wife into exile in 1956, was a "second birth". He co-founded influential magazines, Shir (Poetry) and Mawaquif (Position), embracing colloquial Arabic and opposing both Arab nationalism and poetry as propaganda. TS Eliot was one of the first poets they interviewed, and Adonis collaborated on translations of The Waste Land, as well as on the works of Ezra Pound, Stephen Spender, Philip Larkin and Robert Lowell. He combined new sources with an encyclopaedic, "virgin" reading of Arabic classics. True creation, he says, is "always modern because it speaks to us - Ovid, Heraclitus, Homer, Dante. What's not modern are the imitators. In classical Arabic poetry, you have to know how to distinguish between the greats and their imitators."

His long poem This Is My Name (1970) was spurred by shock at the Arab defeat of 1967. The Book of Siege (1982) came out of the Lebanese civil war that began in 1975, and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which he lived through, before leaving for Paris. As he wrote in the opening lines: "The cities dissolve, and the earth is a cart loaded with dust. / Only poetry knows how to pair itself to this space." The six-day war "was terrible, but I wasn't conscious then of its tragic nature, as I was in 1982," he says.

He had first welcomed the Iranian revolution of 1979, but swiftly rejected its reactionary turn. His book The Fixed and the Changing (1974) on a struggle between creativity and intolerance in the Arab world, identified an Arab malaise of "pastism", which he defines now as seeing the past as the "source you must return to, despite the river running on with time. One has to break this circular time. You can't have a revolution to go back to the past."

As the Arab uprisings spread, Adonis said in a television interview that he could not take part in a revolution that emanated from the mosques. He was accused of siding with the regimes, and being out of touch with the dire circumstance of revolt. Asked whether he supports the peaceful protests, he spreads his arms as though pulling a concertina: "If you have a petition, I'll sign it." Does he worry that his words echo Arab dictators who pose as bulwarks against Islamists? "But with a difference," he says. "I'm against the regimes of Ben Ali and Assad, and against the Islamist opposition, because I don't want to fight one despotism for the sake of another ... If we don't separate religion from the state, and free women from Sharia law, we'll just have more despots. Military dictatorship controls your mind. But religious dictatorship controls your mind and body."

What of Islamist power through the ballot box? "In that case, democracy won't be a criterion of progress, so the notion of democracy has to be rethought. Truth is not always on the side of democracy - what can you do?" He concedes that democracy, "with all its failings, is much less bad than dictatorship". Rule by democratically elected Islamists would, "absolutely be better - but I'd be against it".

With Syria teetering on civil war - and speaking before President al-Assad rejected Arab League calls to step down - Adonis was unequivocal that "the present regime absolutely has to go. The Ba'ath party has to go, and another regime to be put in place that's secular, democratic and pluralist." Yet he is against both armed uprising and foreign intervention. "Guns can't resolve these problems. If everyone took up arms, there'd be civil war." Outside military intervention has "destroyed Arab countries, from Iraq to Libya". As for its humanitarian rationale, "it's not true - it's to colonise. If westerners really want to defend Arab human rights, they have to start by defending the rights of the Palestinians."

Calls for intervention from within Arab countries "are wrong; it doesn't make sense. How can you build the foundations of the state with the help of the same people who colonised these countries before?" At a talk this month in the House of Poetry in Paris, he held up a photograph published in al-Quds of some US soldiers in Iraq apparently desecrating the dead. "American soldiers pissed on Iraqi corpses," he says indignantly. "So these are the same people they want to call in to liberate Arabs, and piss on the living?"

Yet within the west, he argues "there are many wests - of Rimbaud, Whitman and Eliot, and of Bush, Sarkozy and Cameron." Explaining his view of Arab culture as extinct, he says: "What is civilisation? It's the creation of something new, like a painting. A people that no longer creates becomes a consumer of the products of others. That's what I mean by the Arabs being finished - not as a people, but as a creative presence."

Adonis holds no hope that poetry can change society. To do that, "you have to change its structures - family, education, politics. That's work art cannot do". Yet he believes it can change the "relationship between things and words, so a new image of the world can be born." Theorising about poetry is "like speaking about love. There are some things you can't explain. The world is not created to be understood, but to be contemplated and questioned."

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Adonis: 'I am radically against violence - I'm with Gandhi, not Guevara'

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Adonis, the greatest living poet of the Arab world, ushers me down a labyrinthine corridor in a stately building in Paris, near the Champs Elysées. The plush offices belong to a benefactor, a Syrian-born businessman funding the poet's latest venture - a cultural journal in Arabic, which he edits.

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Common themes include love, death, creative destruction, God and atheism.

Identity, memory and exile.

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IB English Revision How to Analyse a Poem

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IB English Revision: How to Structure an Essay!

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Adonis Interview: Religion Corrupted Poetry