Foremost among the poetic accomplishments of the ʿAbbāsid age was the sudden flowering of a highly rhetorical and strikingly modern style of poetry, termed "badīʿ." It found its most radical and controversial exponent in the celebrated panegyrist to the courts of al-Maʾmūn and al-Muʿtaṣim, Abū Tammām Ḥabīb ibn Aws al-Ṭāʾī.
The present study offers a reevaluation...