The poets before Islam sang about revenge and fighting in a way that even nauseates us. The martial spirit in the _Romance of Antar_ has made it less popular with us than _The Arabian Nights_, for the former work is an account of the fighting Arabs of the desert, and the latter deals largely with the merchant Arabs of the city. Even the great and beautiful _Song of Vengeance_ by the Arab Robin Hood, Ta abbata Sharran, of which we have a second hand translation by Goethe, and fine verse versions by R. A. Nicholson, _Literary History of the Arabs_ (pp. 98-100), and by Charles J. Lyall on pages 48-49 of _Arabic Poetry_, is very cruel.
Pre-islamic poetry reeks too much with the ecstasy of delight to shed blood, in which tendency it of course differs little from the early poetry of other nations. However, the remarkable thing is that the hearts of these warriors possessed so many fine feelings. One of the noblest descriptions of woman is by a companion of the brigand Sharran, from the _Mufaddaliyyat_, a translation of which appears on pages 81-82 of Lyall's volume.
The Arabian poetry which has been most frequently translated and written about in English is Pre-islamic poetry. In especial, the _Muallaqat_, or the seven so-called suspended poems, has been translated several times. Sir William Jones made the first translation in prose in the eighteenth century. In modern times we have had several translations, one by Wilfrid Blunt and his wife. There has been considerable support for the critical view that these poems represent the highest achievement of Arabic poetry, both among Arabs themselves and Aryan critics. Imru'ul Qays, who flourished in the sixth century A.D., is the most famous of the poets in the collection, and is regarded by many as the greatest Arabian poet. R. A. Nicholson and Clement Huart have given accounts of the _Muallaqat_ in their histories of Arabic Literature. Professor Mackail has published in his Oxford Lectures an essay on these odes and D. Nöldeke has given us a full study of them in the _Encyclopedia Britannica_. I shall not therefore dwell on them except to say that they were collected in the eighth century by Hammad, and that most of these poems deal with warriors rather than lovers, though they contain love laments.