How the Qaṣīda Sees: Vision, Poetic Knowledge, and the Transformative Capacity of Poetry from al-Andalus to the Maghreb

This project considers the ways poets and critics conceived poetry as functioning visually. In twelfth-century al-Andalus, Arabic rhetorical criticism conceptualized poetry as having the power to transform feeling and cause action primarily because it evoked images and made one see. They called this