Abstract

Criticism of literary works and their relationship with the social environment and poet's spirit, under the titles of "social criticism" and "psychological criticism", is considered a new debate in contemporary literary criticism. Although the foundations and criteria of these critical methods have been organized coherently in recent centuries, the search in the old Arabic literary criticism clearly shows that these topics, from the very distant past, without mentioning the modern terms, It has been constantly discussed among literary scholars. This research, with a descriptive-analytical method, has reread and analyzed the views of some prominent critics of the Abbasid era (Ibn Salam, Jahiz, Ibn Qutaybah, Ibn Tabataba, Al-Amadi, and Qazi Al-Jarjani) in this field. Also, this research has tried to answer the question that to what extent did the critics of the Abbasid era pay attention to the effect of the geographical and social environment and the mental states of the poet in composing poetry? The results obtained from this research show that these critics, despite the many differences of opinion they have always had on some critical issues, but all of them have considered poetry as a linguistic phenomenon and strongly influenced by meta-linguistic elements. And all of them have spoken in detail about the profound effects of the geographical and social environment and the mental states of the poet as influential elements in the composition of poetry