ABSTRACT
That a poet could choose in principle between targeting one audience and winning currency among many is easily evident. To truly understand the play on tradition, in the second case, requires an in-depth intertextual approach for which the wealth of medieval Arabic poetry and poetic criticism can be tapped.1 This book, however, studies the first case, the strategies a poet devised in reaching one contemporary audience. In this pragmatic approach, the contextualized meaning, that is, the speaker’s meaning, is considered the essential meaning.2 This makes the praise qaṣīda part of an interaction larger than the text, while taking full account of the qaṣīda’s specific speech character. Textual and contextual aspects can then be linked within the limits of Ibn al-Rūmī’s subjectivity.3
