What does it mean to grow up in a Lebanese-American household where Kahlil Gibran is not just a poet but a family connection? In this remarkable personal essay, poet Philip Metres — a distant cousin of Gibran through the Boulos family of Brooklyn — traces the complicated legacy of the third most widely read poet in history.
By Philip Metres · Republished by the Kahlil Gibran Collective · 25 September 2018
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran — first edition, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1923.
According to a review of Gibran biographies by Joan Acocella in The New Yorker, Gibran's publishing numbers for The Prophet (1923) place him third all-time among poets — after Shakespeare and Lao-tzu — with over nine million copies sold in the United States alone. Yet among contemporary literary circles, his reputation remains curiously contested. How do we account for the gap between Gibran's immense popular reach and his dismissal by the literary establishment?
Few people are better placed to explore that question than Philip Metres. A celebrated American poet of Lebanese descent, Metres grew up in a household where Gibran was not merely a cultural symbol but a family presence — the Boulos family of Brooklyn Heights (290 Hicks Street) had hosted Gibran in the 1920s, and he holds a handwritten letter from the poet to his great-grandmother, Nehia Boulos, dated April 22, 1927. In this essay, originally published in The Sound of Listening (University of Michigan Press, 2018) and reprinted in Literary Hub, Metres meditates on Gibran's legacy with the rare combination of personal intimacy and critical rigour.
It is one of the finest pieces of writing about Gibran's place in Arab-American culture and in the wider literary world — and we recommend it unreservedly.
Read the full essay at Literary Hub: On the Third Most Popular Poet of All Time — Philip Metres
Philip Metres is the author of Ochre & Rust: New Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky (2023), Shrapnel Maps (2020), The Sound of Listening (2018), Sand Opera (2015), and other books. His work has garnered fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the NEA, and the Ohio Arts Council, and he has received the Hunt Prize, the Adrienne Rich Award, three Arab American Book Awards, the Lyric Poetry Prize, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He is Professor of English and Director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University, and Core Faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Essay © Philip Metres 2018. Originally published in The Sound of Listening, University of Michigan Press, and reprinted in Literary Hub. Republished by the Kahlil Gibran Collective with acknowledgement to the author.
