Employing the mythical symbol and its psychological impact in Nazik Al-Malaika`s poetry

Abstract

The research aims to demonstrate the ability of the poet Nazik Al-Malaika to employ mythical symbols and link them to her psychological motivations as a poet, and to explain the relationship of closeness between the mythical symbol and the psychological motivation through which this symbol was invoked and linked to the psychological impact and her motivation, as it expresses the state that the poet is in: whether it is love, hate or in anger...etc. It is known that each of the mythological symbols has its own side. Some of these symbols expressed love, as in the symbol of Cupid, the god of love or the child of love, and some of them expressed anger, as in the symbol of Zeus or Medusa, and for fertility and abundance, as in the symbols of Ishtar and Tammuz, and other symbols. The mythical symbols are among the important cultural references in contemporary poetry, which poets have benefited from, whether the poet is Arab or Western, due to its great ability to reveal the hidden aspects of the poet that he/she cannot express directly except through symbols, myth carries within itself vitality and vast worlds of imagination that prompt the poet to summon it and employ it in his/her poems. The reality in which the contemporary poet lives is a turbulent world full of anger and hatred. The poet expressed these phenomena through symbols, as is the case in the Oedipus myth, through which the poet explained a psychological complex, which is the son’s relationship with his mother.