We know of no orations [khutba] except by the Arabs and Persians …. The Greeks have philosophy and the craft of logic, but the author of the Logic [Aristotle] himself … was not described as eloquent … [As for] the [speech] of the Arabs it is all extemporaneity and spontaneity, as though it is [simply] inspiration.

Al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 868/9), al-Bayān wa-l-tabyīn

In the introduction to Fī Sabīl al-tāj (1920) (For the Sake of the Crown), an adaptation of François Coppée's 1895 play Pour la Couronne, dedicated to Saʿd Zaghlūl (1859–1927) – leader of the nationalist Wafd party – Muṣṭafā Luṭfī al-Manfalūṭī (1876–1924) describes art's ‘didactic’ mission to explain his choice of translation. He relies on the promising analogy between the Balkan people's resistance to Ottoman invasion and Egypt's 1919 Revolution. Al-Manfalūṭī uses the play to model historical resistance and draws a parallel between the Balkan king and Zaghlūl in their quest to unite the people under kalimat al-umma (the nation's word). However, in his contemporaries’ view, al-Manfalūṭī's work was too detached from political reality. He was both a bad romantic and a bad translator. The realists found his writing irrelevant and the romantics deemed it not ‘subjective’ enough to modernise Arabic literature.

In the introduction to al-Dīwān fī al-naqd wa-l-adab (1921) (A Book on Criticism and Literature), which he co-wrote with Ibrāhīm ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Māzinī (1890–1949), ʿAbbās Maḥmūd al-ʿAqqād (1889–1964) muses that ‘a true poet does not need to show what objects look like but to express his peculiar mode of perception’, a view distinctly opposed to al-Manfalūṭī's neoclassical, ornate style. The two poets make a claim to an earlier modernity. Much like the later Syrian poet Adonis, they recall classical Arabic literature's elasticity and openness to foreign influence in pushing their modernist agenda: namely, the free adaptation of European literature to expand the Arabic language, literary themes, and generic forms.