UC Berkeley

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 poetic capacity, takhyīl (image-evocation). In twentieth-century Morocco, poet and critic Mohammed Bennis approached the visual dimension of the poem to experiment with the possibilities of a new kind of writing that, in overturning the established modes of seeing in the poem, would bring forth a new vision (ruʾya) of the world. I propose that poetic visuality at both moments operates in the slippage between literal, physical vision and a metaphorical, imagined one.

Engaging literary critical, optical, and poetic sources, How the Qaṣīda Sees unravels poetic seeing as a specific experience of sociality within the praise poem (qaṣīdat al-madḥ). The main contention here is that considering how the praise poem works visually nuances our understanding of its social role and reveals how poetry simultaneously shapes, and is shaped by, a larger perceptual culture. The main modes of poetic seeing I examine in this dissertation are: takhyīl’s capacity to make one “see what cannot be seen” (ruʾyat mā lā yurā), twelfth-century calligraphic visual poems of the twelfth century, the renewal of the poetic motif of the ṭayf al-khayāl (the phantom of the beloved). One outcome of reading the poem’s visuality is the throughline that connects Andalusī and Maghribī poetry. My claim here is that twentieth-century Moroccan poetry was able to elaborate a new poetics within a larger (experimental) visual culture, which in drawing from an Andalusī-Maghribī visual inheritance, could free itself from colonial aesthetic imposition.

Throughout the dissertation, I trace in the concept of poetic knowledge, which emerges from the dynamic of poetic seeing and the poem’s social role, a poetics that encompasses a poet’s personal vision as it reaches for a collective one; a poetics that attempts to transform the reader’s ways of being in, and seeing, the world.