The first English-language study of the Persian prison poem Through a series of insightful and sophisticated readings, this book reveals the worldliness of premodern Persian poetry. It traces the political role of poetry in shaping the prison poem genre (habsiyyat) across 12th-century Central, South and West Asia. The emergence of the genre is indebted to the increasing importance of the poet, who came into increasing conflict with Ghaznavid and Saljuq sovereigns as the genre developed. Uniting the polarities of perpetuity and contingency, the poet's body became the medium for the prison poem's oppositional poetics. Bringing theorists as wide ranging as Kantorowicz, Benjamin and Adorno into conversation with classical Persian poetics, this book offers an unprecedented account of prison poetry before modernity, and of premodern Persianate culture within the framework of world literature and global politics. Key Features - Develops a new approach to genre based on the political status of the prison poem - Offers an unprecedented account of the interrelations of poetry and power in premodern literature - Sheds new light on Muslim-Christian relations by documenting the multi-confessional orientation of many prison poems - Relates the trajectory of the prison poem genre in premodern poetics to Iranian literary modernism, including the prison poems of Muhammad Taqi Bahar Rebecca Ruth Gould is Professor, Islamic World and Comparative Literature at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of the poetry collections Beautiful English (2021) and Cityscapes (2019), the monograph Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus (2016), and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism (2020).