The Image of Childhood in the Contemporary Poems of Iraq (Badr Shakir al-Sayyab and Abdul Wahab al-Bayyati as a Sample)

The childhood’s image is so important in the Iraqi poems because of its great influence in the poet’s character, since it cannot be regarded as margined memories. This study aims to show the image of childhood in the minds of contemporary poets in Iraq in order to discover their characters and effect of childhood on their creative poems, and how they could describe the beauty of childhood in forming their poems. The main reason why the researcher chose this study is that it refers to the true and innocent image od the poets’ lives, and it is a mean by which we can understand the nature of the sources which helped the poet to form his poems, and thus, childhood is the best image which can be shown in the poems because they could concentrate on the psychological, social and political roles and use them as effective messages to cure the human crisis. The researcher chose two poets to fulfill her study: Badr Shakir al-Sayyab and Abdul Wahab al-Bayyati as two sample contemporary poets of Iraq. The researcher used the analytic and descriptive method which the best in dealing with childhood’s image in those two poets’ poetry and can easily be understood by the reader. The study contains a foreword, three chapters and an end. The researcher explained that the childhood’s image forms historical impressions to the poets in comparison with time and place, so they could give life to the places and characters in the image of childhood, and it can affect the children themselves and help them solving their problems, especially those who lived in poverty and oppression. All these images were clear in the poems of those two poets.