The Arabian Nights is the best known Arabic production to English speaking people and is full of poetry,
not only in the interspersed verses, but in the stories themselves.
The Romance of Antar, from which I quoted a poem, is said to have been written by a poet and philologist in the reign of Harun al Rashid. The work is long and a few abridged volumes were translated into English by Terrick Hamilton in 1819 and 1820.
Then there is the great poet of Cordova, Ibn Zaydun of the eleventh century, whose love for the princess Wallada has made him celebrated. Here is a beautiful love poem translated by Nicholson, Literary History of the Arabs, pp. 425-426:
To-day my longing thoughts recall thee here;
The landscape glitters, and the sky is clear.
So feebly breathes the gentle zephyr's gale,
In pity of my grief it seems to fail.
The silvery fountains laugh, as from a girl's
Fair throat a broken necklace sheds its pearls.
Oh, 'tis a day like those of our sweet prime,
When, stealing pleasure from indulgent Time,
We played midst flowers of eye-bewitching hue,
That bent their heads beneath the drops of dew.
Alas, they see me now bereaved of sleep;
They share my passion and with me they weep.
Here in her sunny haunt the rose blooms bright,
Adding new lustre to Aurora's light;
And waked by morning beams, yet languid still,
The rival lotus doth his perfume spill.
All stirs in me the memory of that fire
Which in my tortured breast will ne'er expire.
Had death come ere we parted, it had been
The best of all days in the world, I ween;
And this poor heart, where thou art every thing,
Would not be fluttering now on passion's wing.
Ah, might the zephyr waft me tenderly,
Worn out with anguish as I am, to thee!
O treasure mine, if lover e'er possessed
A treasure! O thou dearest, queenliest!
Once, once, we paid the debt of love complete
And ran an equal race with eager feet.
How true, how blameless was the love I bore,
Thou hast forgotten; but I still adore!
Nor have I sounded the depth of Arabian poetry. Their greatest mystic poet was Umar Ibn ul Farid, who flourished between 1181 and 1235, and whose work is full of fervid and inspired poetry.
There is also Baha ad Din Zuhayr (d. 1258 A.D.), the love poet of Egypt, whose complete poems have been translated into English by Edward H. Palmer.
One of the great products of Arabic culture was its work in literary criticism. While it is the fashion to-day to lay much stress on the Italian and English studies of Aristotle's Poetics in the Renaissance and Elizabethan periods respectively, the Arabs were writing learnedly on poetry centuries before they read the Poetics. They made a specialty of the literature called the Adab, or belles lettres made up of criticism, quotation and rhetoric.
The criticism of poetry flourished among the Arabs in the ninth and tenth centuries A.D. as a higher art than it did in the sixteenth century among the Italians and English. Unfortunately none of these works have been translated; there is not even a reference to their influence in Saintsbury's History of Criticism in Europe. The Arabs had so many poets even in Pre-islamic times in the sixth century that interest in preserving this poetry gave rise later to anthologists who made collections. These anthologists commented on the poetical work and compared it with that of later periods, and with that of their contemporaries.