News of Abu Tammam

The subject of this book, as its name indicates, is news about Abu Tammam and his relationship with those he praised, such as Ahmad ibn Abi Dawud, al-Hasan ibn Raja, and Ibn al-Zayyat, and the relationship of scholars and men of letters with him, and how they used to compose his poetry.
The book is valuable in that it reveals to us some aspects of Abu Tammam that we did not know in what we read in other books, and its author, al-Suli, is trustworthy in what he narrates, and is close to Abu Tammam, and has insight into literature and good taste in appreciation. The book completes a series of books that appeared in al-Suli’s era or close to it.
Abu Tammam came out to people with a new type of poetry that he brought out from his head, not from his heart. He dives into rational meanings, then raises them to the sky and uses his distant imagination in them, choosing words for them, and paying attention to their beauty and paronomasia, so he achieved from his deep meanings to the bottom and his imagination rising to the sky, and his harmonious and decorated words, a new type of poetry that had not been achieved before.