This chapter reopens the archive of so-called romantic Arabic poetry to ask “how romantic,” both as a question of definition (how was it romantic, exactly?) and as a question of degree (how romantic was it, really?). Drumsta offers a few microscopic glimpses at the archive of interwar Egyptian poetry and criticism that illustrate how dramatically aesthetic theories, poetic terminology, and critical “frames of reference” – to borrow a term from Einstein’s special theory of relativity – were shifting in this period, and not necessarily or always in the direction of the romantic. First, Drumsta analyzes the second of two essays by the poet and critic ʿAbbās Maḥmūd al-ʿAqqād (1889–1964) titled “Shawqī in the Balance” (Shawqī fī al-Mīzān) from the 1920–1921 periodical al-Dīwān. Although al-ʿAqqād does not specifically invoke Einstein or relativity in al-Dīwān, his willingness to strike so decisively at the basic foundations of Arabic poetry and aesthetics mirrors Einstein’s approach to his period’s widely accepted principles of physics, and in this, the chapter suggests, al-ʿAqqād is a decidedly modern thinker.