امرؤ القيس
Imruʾ al-Qays
Person
A prince of the Kinda tribe in the sixth century, usually reckoned the greatest of the pre-Islamic poets.
What it means
His ode, one of the Mu‘allaqat, begins with the famous lines about stopping to weep at an abandoned camp, and it is a model of Arabic poetry before the Quran. The Quran came to a people proud of their eloquence, and challenged them to produce a surah like it (2:23). It is the reason that the Arabic poetry of the age is studied closely in Quranic interpretation.