SOURCE: Arberry, A. J. Introduction to Poems of Al-Mutanabbi, edited by A. J. Arberry, pp. 1-15. London: Cambridge University Press, 1967.

In the following essay, Arberry surveys al-Mutanabbi's literary merits and shortcomings and offers an explanation for his popularity despite his many flaws as a poet.

My Arabic Poetry was intended as an initiation into a study of a great and abundant, but as yet still comparatively unexplored literature, so that the Western reader might hopefully be stimulated to explore farther, being by now a little more oriented towards the ideals at which the Arab poets aimed, the themes of which they sang, the images they invented and elaborated, and the conventions they observed. That anthology comprised specimens of the work of thirty-one poets, ranging in time from the sixth to the twentieth century, and in space from Persia to Morocco. Now in this volume it is intended to...