Transcendence And Individuality In Broken Wings By Khalil Gibran: A Neo-Romantic Perspective Of Love And Spirit

Abstract

The poem Broken Wings (1912) by Khalil Gibran gives a lyrical insight about love, individuality and spiritual awakening which encapsulates the very essence of Neo-Romantic thought. Gibran reconstructs love as a transforming power which transcends the physical urge and breaks the strictness of the rules of society and religion through the use of poetic language and imagery. The image of Selma and narrator developed in the novel turns into a reflection of human desire, in which grief, [1]instead of a way of breaking the spirit, becomes a way of inner liberation and elevation. Nature in Broken Wings comes out as a source of refuge and representation of truth and confirms Gibran in his idea of the divine connection between the human soul and the divine. This paper contends that the novel does not just idealize the Neo-Romanticism values of emotional intensity, individuality, and the sublime, but it reinterprets them in the context of Arab society at the beginning of the twentieth century and its cultural and moral values. By so doing, Gibran creates a story that is both autobiographical and more general, a poetic statement about the ability of love to uplift the spirit of a human being above the lowly things of the earth.