This thesis deals with the development of form - metre and rhyme - in modern Arabic poetry between 1800 and 1964. It consists of introduction, seven chapters, conclusion and bibliography. The first part of Chapter I surveys the first attempt in Egypt to adopt the strophic form for new uses. The second part deals with the adoption in Syria and Lebanon of Arabic strophic forms and English rhyme schemes and metres in Christian hymnals, school songs, novels and plays and translations from European literature. In Chapter II the activities and achievements of Khalil Muträn and. his efforts to use atrophic form in narrative poetry are surveyed. In the second part, the efforts of al-Aqqäd and al-Mäzini to guide the modern poetic movement in Egypt and to encourage the use of atrophic verse were investigated. In Chapter III, the intellectual currents in the Arab world and America which influenced the Mahjari poets in North America, especially that of the form, diction, and themes of the Arabic Protestant hymns are discussed and also their educational background and to what extent these poets exploited the strophic form used in the nineteenth century and to what extent they succeeded in developing new ones Chapter IV deals with the attempts in the Arab World since 1869, to write blank verse (shi'r mursal) in imitation of English blank verse, especially as a medium for drama and long poems. Chapter V treats the shi'r manthür movement initiated by Aman al-Rihani and Gibran Kahlil Gibran in their attempt to imitate Walt Whitman's free verse and its technique. The last section deals with the poets who wrote shi'r manth-ur in their attempt to copy Western free verse. Chapter VI discusses the experiment of Ahmad Zaki Abushädy to imitate American-English free verse in what he called shi'r hurr and his technique, and the difference between his method and that of those who followed him, which stage continued from 1926 to 1946. Chapter VII deals with the second stage of what was also termed shi'r hurr (1947-1964); the difference between this stage in which a poem is composed in one type of metre, irregular length of lines and irregular rhyme schemes, and that of Abushädy, and the former's being an imitation of the Cowleyan stanza and not free verse. Finally, the use of metre, rhyme, repetition, symbols and mythology and the influence of T. S. Eliot are discussed,