ABSTRACT
What has our survey of Arabic and Persian poems, and of the critical poetics which parallels, but does not always wholly keep pace with, poetic practice, taught us about how such poems work? Before attempting to sum up, and before broaching some further issues with respect to how we might begin to read such poetry, what questions we might ask ourselves about it, what others might perhaps prove unanswerable, I would like to look at two further poems, markedly different in form, genre and style, which I think demonstrate what I should like to call the “privileging of styles” which both links and distinguishes (also in a broad sense) Arabic and Persian poetry: Abu¯ Tamma¯m’s qas
˙ ı¯da on the
conquest of Amorium, and the first ghazal of H ˙ a¯fiz ˙ ’s Dı¯va¯n.
