Texts of Islam

Arabian Poetry: Contents

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*Arabian Poetry* (1881), edited by W. A. Clouston, is a Victorian-era anthology and scholarly introduction to classical Arabic literature, drawing on translations by Sir William Jones, J. D. Carlyle, and J. W. Redhouse. Its centerpiece is the Mu'allaqāt — the seven celebrated pre-Islamic prize odes by poets such as Amriolkais, Tarafa, and Antara — presented in Jones's eighteenth-century translations alongside detailed scholarly notes defending the authenticity of early Arabic verse. The collection then broadens into dozens of shorter lyric and epigrammatic poems spanning several centuries of Islamic-era court culture, covering themes from love, elegy, and satire to fatalism, miserliness, and the Crusader capture of Jerusalem. A substantial middle section offers an epitome of the *Romance of Antar*, the vast Arabic chivalric epic following the half-slave warrior-poet Antar through battles, courtly intrigues, and his lifelong pursuit of his beloved Abla. The volume closes with two celebrated "Mantle Poems" — devotional odes in praise of the Prophet by Ka'b ibn Zuhayr and El-Būsīrī — plus appendices on Arab prosody, a Himyarite lay, and the life of the poet Omar. The work is distinctive for combining serious philological apparatus (notes, prosody essay, authenticity debate) with accessible literary translations, positioning Arabic poetry for a Victorian readership largely unfamiliar with it.

Arabian Poetry: Contents

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