The Composition of Mutanabbi's Panegyrics to Sayf Al-Dawla (Studies in Arabic Literature, Vol 14)

The purpose of this study is to identify and describe recurrent patterns of composition in the twenty two major panegyrics Mutanabbī wrote to Sayf al-Dawla during his stay at the ḥamdānid court in Aleppo between 337/948 and 345/956. It discusses the types of utterance used in endings and in cadential lines before definable internal boundaries, the organising conventions of the passages that lead into and out of chronicles of military campaigns, the non-random placement of certain crescendo motifs, various means of local organisation in poems without events, etc. It also considers brief differences in technique between the Aleppo period and Mutanabbī's earlier and later work, and casts a glance at possible predecessors. Based on a sizable and coherent sample of poetry, this study demonstrates that compositional rules and predilections played a pervasive role in Mutanabbī's writing in the years when his career was at its height. Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Table of Contents 6 Introduction and Acknowledgements 8 Chapter One: Endings 10 A. Invocations, optatives, etc. 10 B. Gnomic statements 10 C. Conditionals 12 D. An expanded sample 13 Chapter Two: Getting to the chronicle 15 A. Simple summaries 16 B. Extended summaries 19 C. Bridges to the theme 25 D. Other cases 26 Chapter Three: Cadence 28 A. Cadence before the onset of the chronicle 29 B. Cadence before “poet, prince and rivals” 32 C. Cadence before hijāʾ 33 D. Cadence before less rigorously defined seams 35 Excursus: The placement of isocola 38 Chapter Four: From chronicle to closure 44 A. Disengagement from the particular 44 B. Crescendo motifs in the coda 48 C. The particular against the expanded background 55 Chapter Five: Local structures in poems without events 60 A. Text Four 60 B. Text Three 66 Chapter Six: A note on Text Eight 73 Chapter Seven: A glance at the earlier and later work 80 A. Before Aleppo 80 B. After Aleppo 82 Chapter Eight: A predecessor 85 Appendix One: Some diagrams 91 Appendix Two: Cadential occurrences of conditional sentences beginning with in, idhā, and law 94 Appendix Three: The texts 95 Bibliography 135 Index 137 STUDIES IN ARABIC LITERATURE 138

The purpose of this study is to identify and describe recurrent patterns of composition in the twenty two major panegyrics Mutanabbī wrote to Sayf al-Dawla during his stay at the hūamdānid court in Aleppo between 337/948 and 345/956.
It discusses the types of utterance used in endings and in cadential lines before definable internal boundaries, the organising conventions of the passages that lead into and out of chronicles of military campaigns, the non-random placement of certain crescendo motifs, various means of local organisation in poems without events, etc. It also considers brief differences in technique between the Aleppo period and Mutanabbī's earlier and later work, and casts a glance at possible predecessors.
Based on a sizable and coherent sample of poetry, this study demonstrates that compositional rules and predilections played a pervasive role in Mutanabbī's writing in the years when his career was at its height.

The purpose of this study is to identify and describe recurrent patterns of composition in the twenty two major panegyrics Mutanabbi wrote to Sayf al-Dawla during his stay at the Hamdanid court in Aleppo between 337/948 and 345/956. It discusses the types of utterance used in endings and in cadential lines before definable internal boundaries, the organising conventions of the passages that lead into and out of chronicles of military campaigns, the non-random placement of certain crescendo motifs, various means of local organisation in poems without events, etc. It also considers brief differences in technique between the Aleppo period and Mutanabbi's earlier and later work, and casts a glance at possible predecessors. Based on a sizable and coherent sample of poetry, this study demonstrates that compositional rules and predilections played a pervasive role in Mutanabbi's writing in the years when his career was at its height. Based on a sizable and coherent sample of poetry (the twenty-two major panegyrics to Sayf al-Dawla), this study identifies and describes the compositional rules and predilections that played a dominant role in Mutanabbī's verse in the Aleppo period. Based on a sizable and coherent sample of poetry (the twenty-two major panegyrics to Sayf al-Dawla), this study identifies and describes the compositional rules and predilections that played a dominant role in Mutanabbi's verse in the Aleppo period.