Who is the most prolific Arabic poet?

Ibn al-Rumi, by surviving output, with roughly 2,012 poems, followed by Ibn Nubata al-Misri with 1,726 and Abu al-Ala al-Maarri with 1,609. This ranks what has reached us rather than what was composed; a great deal of Arabic poetry was lost.

Where does al-Mutanabbi rank by output?

Sixty-eighth, with roughly 322 surviving poems, despite being the most celebrated poet in the Arabic language. Reputation in Arabic poetry has never tracked volume; it rests on individual lines that travel.

How many poems by Imru al-Qays survive?

About 65, which places him 266th by output, even though his Mu'allaqa is the most famous poem in Arabic. The same holds for the Mu'allaqat poets generally — al-Harith ibn Hilliza survives in just 17 poems.

Does a large body of work mean a poet is better?

No. Comparing the ranking by output against the ranking by fame shows the two are close to independent. The poets most taught today are middling in output, while the most prolific are barely mentioned by general readers.

How many Arabic poets have surviving collections?

One of the largest open archives holds 573 poets and roughly 79,000 poems, an average of about 56 poems each. That is what survived, not what was written.

The Most Prolific Arabic Poets, and Why They Are Not the Most Famous

This is an attempt to rank Arabic poets by how much of their work has reached us. The ranking itself is less interesting than what it exposes: in Arabic poetry, volume and reputation are two lines that barely intersect.

The twenty most prolific

#	Poet	Poems
1	Ibn al-Rumi	2,012
2	Ibn Nubata al-Misri	1,726
3	Abu al-Ala al-Maarri	1,609
4	Hasan Husni al-Tuwayrani	1,394
5	Ibn al-Wardi	1,182
6	Abu Nuwas	1,171
7	al-Sharif al-Uqayli	981
8	Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi	965
9	al-Buhturi	923
10	Muhyi al-Din ibn Arabi	917
11	Safi al-Din al-Hilli	892
12	al-Ahnaf al-Ukbari	819
13	al-Farazdaq	779
14	Salah al-Din al-Safadi	778
15	Abu al-Atahiya	751
16	Lisan al-Din ibn al-Khatib	746
17	Ibn al-Mutazz	741
18	Abu al-Fath al-Busti	728
19	al-Sanawbari	691
20	al-Qadi al-Fadil	683

Those twenty alone carry about a quarter of the entire archive — 25.8% of 79,268 poems.

The paradox

Now look at where the most celebrated names in Arabic poetry actually fall:

Poet	Rank	Poems
Hassan ibn Thabit	60	367
al-Mutanabbi	68	322
Jarir	81	289
Antara ibn Shaddad	173	118
al-Khansa	194	99
Imru al-Qays	266	65
Zuhayr ibn Abi Sulma	298	53
Tarafa ibn al-Abd	385	34
al-Harith ibn Hilliza	479	17

al-Mutanabbi — who cannot be left out of any account of Arabic poetry — sits sixty-eighth. Imru al-Qays, author of the most famous Mu’allaqa in the language, sits two hundred and sixty-sixth. al-Harith ibn Hilliza, one of the seven, survives in seventeen poems.

The reason is plain enough. Reputation in Arabic poetry is built on lines that circulate, not on volumes that sit. A single line of al-Mutanabbi is repeated more often than another poet’s complete collected works.

Who the prolific actually are

Ibn al-Rumi leads with two thousand poems, and was known for a long breath — it was said of him that he exhausted a thought so thoroughly that he left nothing in it for anyone else. Abu al-Ala al-Maarri is third; his Luzumiyyat alone runs past a thousand pieces, composed under a self-imposed rhyme constraint stricter than the form required.

Notice that most of the top twenty belong to the Abbasid and late eras. That is not because they were better poets. It is because their eras are nearer and writing was well established by then, so their work survived whole. Of the pre-Islamic poets, only what lodged in the memories of transmitters came through at all.

The table, in other words, measures what survived, not what was said.

The median poet

The middle poet in this archive has about 56 poems. The distance between that poet and the leader is enormous — a factor of thirty-six — which is the shape every human archive tends to take: a small number of contributors holding most of the volume.

How these figures were read

They are taken from the poet pages on Qafiyah: 573 poets holding 79,268 poems. Poem counts were collected per poet and sorted.

Two cautions belong with the table:

It ranks quantity, not value. It makes no claim that Ibn al-Rumi is a better poet than al-Mutanabbi.
It ranks what reached us. More pre-Islamic poetry was lost than survived, and had it survived the whole table would look different.

Each poet has their own page, and their work can also be browsed by meter, rhyme or theme.