Poetry
idea · 3 works · 3 mentions · 5 anchored passages
poetry · الشعر · al-shiʻr · meter and rhythm · poets · song · song and verse · tragedy · علم الشعر
in the texts
Bayān zaghl al-ʻilm wa-al-ṭalab
Verse, treated as a species of speech whose stock in trade is lying and excess in panegyric, lampoon and boasting, with the most charming verse being the most false, and a graded scale of poets from the praiseworthy to the unbelieving.
So if the poet is eloquent, fluent, forward in lying with his tongue, set upon earning his living by poetry and thin in religion, then he has read the loathing of poetry in the Sūrah of the Poets (al-Shuʻarāʼ).
( The Science of Poetry (*al-shiʻr*) )
Evagoras
The poetic tradition of song, tragedy, meter, and heroic praise against which the prose encomium defines itself.
Nevertheless, although poetry has advantages so great, we must not shrink from the task, but must make the effort and see if it will be possible in prose to eulogize good men in no worse fashion than their encomiasts do who employ song and verse.
Besides, the poets compose all their works with meter and rhythm, while the orators do not share in any of these advantages;
Furthermore, of the returns to their thrones by princes of ancient times the most renowned are those of which the poets tell us:
Kitāb mīzān al-ḥaqq fī al-manṭiq
Poetry, excluded from logic as a self-standing art yielding no certainty, yet used a paragraph earlier as illustration
Most authors have indeed brought the table (al-jadwal), rhetoric (khaṭābah), and poetry — indeed, even fallacy — into logic.
And thought may go corrupt in the state it is in — so that it makes you fancy the pearl to be a drop of the night dew
As the poet said: