Poetry in those days was evidently a remunerative pursuit. Nīzamī tells us that Khidr Khán always had in readiness four trays of gold. "These he used to dispense by the handful" to the successful poets. Though the royal favour towards the poets was extremely bountiful, Persian poets were not always particularly courteous the one to the other. Nīzamī tells an amusing story of a minor poet named Rashídí. At the king's command the Poet-Laureate was asked to express his opinion of Rashídí's poetry. The Poet-Laureate accordingly remarked: "His verse is extremely good and chaste and correct, but it wants spice." The king afterwards repeated these words to Rashídí and bade him compose a fitting rejoinder. Rashídí composed the following verse:
You stigmatise my verse as "wanting spice,"
And possibly, my friend, you may be right.
My verse is honey-flavoured, sugar-sweet,
And spice with such could scarcely cause delight.
Spice is for you, you blackguard, not for me,
For beans and turnips is the stuff you write!
This was not kind; but Rashídí received all four baskets of gold that day!
The technical study of prosody was instituted by Khalil ibn i Ahmad i Bicrí. He is said to have discovered this science by listening to the rythmic beats of the fuller's mallets upon his clothes. This story is mentioned in Saifi's Treatise on Prosody.[1]
Much of Persian poetry is conventional, and the demarcation in style, due to the various phases of Persian history, is not as pronounced as might be expected. The Persian poets not only conservatively followed old metres, but old similes, old subjects as well. It was with words they were most concerned, and not with ideas. The Lover's Companion of Sharafu'd-Dín Rámí is sufficient to prove this. The book contains a very large number of similes on the various parts of the body. This was intended to be a vade mecum to the writer of erotic poetry. Professor Brown defends this conservatism and remarks that it has "guarded the Persian language from the vulgarisation which the triumph of an untrained, untrammelled, and unconventional genius of the barbaric-degenerate type tends to produce in our own and other European tongues."
[1] See The Prosody of the Persians. By H. Blockmann, Calcutta, 1872.