Arabic Picture-Poems and the Simple ‘Tree’

Abstract

Arabic picture-poems have a thousand-year history but have been largely ignored by western literary historians and art historians. Only one poet working in the medium has attracted a small body of scholarly studies, al-Jilyānī (AD 1136–1206). This paper will give an overview of existing scholarship on the topic, describe the codified auditory features of classical Arabic poetry that can give rise to different levels of pictorial patterning, and analyse a chronological series of four picture-poems that employ the same motif, a tree, to different effect. Situating picture-poetry more generally in relation to current issues in Arabic literary history, it will suggest how knowledge of, or lack of access to, the manuscript-supports and -formats of pre-modern Arabic literature may inflect our approaches to it.