Biography in Classical Arabic Poetry: Publicity, Immortalisation and Mythicisation

Abstract

The study investigates Arabic praise and lament poetry from the perspective of biographies that chronicle the life of the praised and the lamented. It assumes that the poet produces a three-dimensional biography that is axed on publicity, immortalization and mythicisation. The data under investigation in the current enquiry comprised poetry excerpts that were conveniently sampled. In particular, discourse analysis was employed to analyse rhetorical structure and text organisation in the target poetry excerpts, in such a way to capture the essence the biographies under scrutiny and their capacity to create extended rhetorics. The biographies were also investigated to evaluate their capacity to generate organic imagery and filtered imagery, leaving ample possibilities for the interpretation of artistry in poetry.