Al-Asmaʿi’s Criteria for Judging Poetry

Al-Asma'i poetry criteria for judging
Al-Asma’i is the first to set a set of characteristics and conditions to define the features of the poet al-Fahal. Sharp and decisive in his judgment, and his judgments were unexplained, influenced by the spirit of his time that was dominated by improvisation and impressionism, which was a measure of his preference among poets, judgments that reflect his own taste, and his understanding of what virility is.
Al-Asma'i wanted to introduce us to the most creative, superior, and brilliant pre-Islamic poets, so he considered describing them as stallions, and there is no doubt that Al-Asma'i's mind and his critical mentality had certain criteria through which he was able to place some poets in the group of stallions, while he excluded others, and they found that they did not reach The rank of those in their poetic creativity, and perhaps the most prominent of these criteria and the scale on which he relied in his classification of poets are:
1. The quality of poetry. 2- The poetic quantity. 3- The time. 4- The method of the early poets. 5- The saying of poetry on all weights. 6- The proficiency of the epithet. 7- The novel.