Kahlil Gibran

Kahlil Gibran: The Prophet Nobody Reviewed

*The Prophet* was published in 1923 to a cool critical reception and has not been out of print since. It has been rendered into more than a hundred languages, placing it among the ten most translated books ever written. Elvis Presley was given a copy in 1956 and annotated it heavily; John Lennon borrowed from it; John F. Kennedy's 1961 inaugural echoed the rhetoric of a Gibran essay from 1925. The book sat in relative obscurity for four decades before the 1960s counterculture found it, after which it became one of the century's best-selling books in the United States. Almost none of this happened because critics said so.

Bsharri to Boston's South End

He was born on 6 January 1883 in Bsharri, in the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, into a Maronite Christian family whose fortunes his father destroyed. Khalil Sa'ad Gibran, a tax collector, was imprisoned for embezzlement and the family property was confiscated. His mother, Kamila Rahmeh, a priest's daughter, made the decision that shaped everything after: in June 1895 she took her children to Boston's South End, then home to a large Syrian-Lebanese community.

He was enrolled at the Josiah Quincy School, where an administrator anglicised his name to "Kahlil Gibran" — an accident of transliteration he carried for life. A teacher noticed his drawing and connected him to the photographer and publisher F. Holland Day, who became his first serious patron and gave him a solo show in his Boston studio in 1904.

Two Educations

At fifteen his family sent him back to Beirut to study at the Collège de la Sagesse, where he acquired the Arabic literary tradition and French. He graduated with honours. The result was a writer with two native registers and full membership in neither literary establishment — a condition that turned out to be his subject.

The second education came later. From 1908 to 1910, financed by Mary Haskell, he studied art in Paris at the Académie Julian under Jean-Paul Laurens and afterwards with Pierre Marcel-Béronneau. There he met Syrian political exiles and became acquainted with Auguste Rodin, though scholars remain sceptical about how much passed between them.

The Woman Who Paid

In 1898 Gibran fell for the poet Josephine Preston Peabody, without result. The consequential relationship began in 1904 with Mary Haskell, a school headmistress nine years his senior, who became his patron, editor, financier and closest confidante for the rest of his life. They were briefly engaged between 1910 and 1911 before Haskell decided she preferred friendship. She paid for Paris, corrected his English, and in 1950 donated nearly a hundred of his original works to the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, which still holds the largest public collection of his art in America.

A third woman mattered without ever appearing. *Broken Wings* (1912) opened a correspondence with the Lebanese writer May Ziadeh that lasted until his death. They never met.

Arabic First, Then English

His Arabic period ran from 1905 — beginning with an essay on music — through *Nymphs of the Valley* (1906), *Spirits Rebellious* (1908), *Broken Wings* (1912), *A Tear and a Smile* (1914), *The Processions* (1919) and *The Tempests* (1920). *Spirits Rebellious*, which attacked clerical authority, was burned in the marketplace in Beirut by priestly zealots.

His Arabic deliberately broke with classical convention, using a colloquial vocabulary that reflected a Boston upbringing rather than a Cairo education. It was, as much as anything, an accident of isolation — and it appealed enormously to Arab immigrants. He belonged to the Mahjar, the émigré Arab literary movement, and refounded the Pen League in 1920. The scholar Salma Khadra Jayyusi called him the single most important influence on Arabic poetry and literature in the first half of the twentieth century.

From about 1911 he wrote increasingly in English: *The Madman* (1918), his first English book, published by Knopf; *The Forerunner* (1920); *The Prophet* (1923); *Sand and Foam* (1926); *Jesus, the Son of Man* (1928), which presents Christ through the accounts of seventy-seven contemporaries; and *The Earth Gods* (1931).

Seven Hundred Drawings

Gibran produced more than seven hundred visual works — pencil, ink, watercolour and gouache, with oil his preferred medium between 1908 and 1914 — and considered himself a painter on equal terms with being a writer. He aimed explicitly at Symbolism, revered Turner as the greatest of English artists, and undertook a portrait cycle called the *Temple of Art* from 1909, drawing the cultural figures of his day. He exhibited at the Montross Gallery in 1914 and at Knoedler in 1917. In 2023, for the centenary of *The Prophet*, the Drawing Center in New York mounted "A Greater Beauty," more than a hundred drawings with manuscripts and notebooks, on the curatorial premise that he viewed himself equally as a visual artist and conceived the drawings as a complement to the writing.

The Prophet

The book's method is its argument: a departing sage answers twenty-six questions on love, marriage, children, work and death in a cadence lifted from the King James Bible, which Gibran once described as "Syriac literature in English words." Blake, whom he called "the God-man," supplied the visionary posture; Whitman the universalism; Sufism and Nietzsche the rest. His theology was frankly syncretic — Maronite by upbringing, then Christian, Muslim, Sufi, theosophical and Jungian by inclination. Around 1911 he drew the Bahá'í leader ʻAbdu'l-Bahá, an encounter that left a strong impression and fed into *Jesus, the Son of Man*.

Why Kahlil Is Called a Genius

The honest answer is that the case rests on reach rather than on complexity, and on a specific compositional skill rather than on intellectual originality. Gibran did not think anything new about love or death. What he could do — and what almost nobody else has managed at this scale — is write sentences in a borrowed liturgical register that survive translation into more than a hundred languages without collapsing. That is a real and rare technical achievement: the prose is built from images and simple syntactic parallelism rather than from idiom, wordplay or cultural reference, which is precisely why it travels. Jayyusi's judgment about his influence on twentieth-century Arabic literature is a serious scholarly claim from a serious scholar, and it rests on his having broken classical Arabic form open for everyone who came after.

The counter-case is substantial and was made loudly for decades. Western critics largely ignored him; the standard complaint is that his work, though mostly written in English, sits awkwardly in the Western literary tradition and reads as sententious when it does not read as vague. Aphorism is the most forgiving of forms, and *The Prophet* is read at weddings and funerals precisely because it makes no difficult demands. His global fame also arrived forty years late, driven by a counterculture that wanted an unaffiliated mystic. He was a superb stylist in a mode that resists the usual tests of literary seriousness — a genuine achievement, and not the same one as depth.

Bsharri Again

By 1929 he had an enlarged liver and was told to stop working, which he found more painful than the illness. He died at St Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan on 10 April 1931, aged forty-eight, of cirrhosis with incipient tuberculosis, having refused last rites. His body was returned to Bsharri, where the Mar Sarkis Monastery now houses the Gibran Museum, and he left his future American royalties to the town for civic improvement. Schools in Brooklyn and Yonkers carry his name, as do gardens in Washington and Beirut. A century on, the book that no reviewer wanted is still selling, in more than a hundred languages, entirely on the recommendation of its readers.

Achievements

• Notable work: The Prophet
• Notable work: Broken Wings
• Notable work: Sand and Foam
• Notable work: The Processions
• Genres: poetry, parable and fable