Al-Mutanabbi

Abu al-Tayyib Ahmad ibn al-Husayn al-Mutanabbi was born in Kufa around 915 CE, claimed prophethood as a young man (the source of his nickname, "the Would-Be Prophet"), and was imprisoned for it. On his release he became a court poet — most famously to Sayf al-Dawla of Aleppo, then to Kafur of Egypt — and produced odes whose grammatical density, rhetorical violence, and personal vanity have set the standard for the Arabic qasida ever since.

His Diwan is the most-memorised, most-commented and most-quoted single book of Arabic poetry. Educated Arabic speakers across centuries can still recite his lines on courage ("al-khaylu wa al-laylu wa al-bayda' ta‘rifuni" — "the horses, the night, and the desert know me"), on time, on death, and on the betrayal of patrons. He was killed by bandits south of Baghdad in 965, allegedly because his servant taunted him into turning back to fight rather than flee — quoting his own most famous line about courage.