Abu Tammam and the Poetics of the ?Abbasid Age

Foremost among the poetic accomplishments of the ?Abbasid age was the sudden flowering of a highly rhetorical and strikingly modern style of poetry, termed "badi?." It found its most radical and controversial exponent in the celebrated panegyrist to the courts of al-Ma?mun and al-Mu?taṣim, Abu Tammam Ḥabib ibn Aws al-Ṭa?i.
The present study offers a reevaluation of the Arabic literary dispute over Abu Tammam and badi?. It then proposes a redefinition of his diwan and of his major anthology, the Ḥamasah, as a metapoesis that served to decode the poetic tradition of the pre-Islamic desert for the Islamic ?Abbasid caliph and his urbane and urban courtiers and subjects, and conversely, to encode contemporary Arab-Islamic political experiences in classical form.
This book is extensively illustrated with original translations.