Scholars of Andalusian Arabic poetry have noted the widespread phenomenon of Andalusian poets composing mu‘aradat (contrafactions or imitations using the same rhyme and meter) of the works of the master poets of the Abbasid era. Arabic literary scholarship to date has not explored the nature of the poetics of such imitations, that is, the way the later poet draws on the base poem while at the same time trying to produce an original literary work. My study aims to investigate this issue through a close examination of one pair of poems: the Abbasid master-poet al-Mutanabbi’s (d.354/965) famous panegyric ode “You Have Enough Sickness” and an imitation of it by the Andalusian poet, Ibn Khafajah (d. 421/1030). Employing speech act theory, the paper shows that the later poet intentionally distinguishes his imitation and differentiates it from the base ode in order to respond to his own political context. He must make his poem a successful performative statement by: 1) being appropriate with a convention that is understood and accepted by speakers and recipients; 2) being compatible with an accepted conventional procedure; and 3) and being proportional to the situation/circumstances. The paper will argue that, in light of speech act theory, that the structural and thematic differences between the two odes can be understood as each poet’s response to his particular political and poetic circumstance and, further, that if each poet had not made the choices he did, the poems would not have been successful performative statements. Al-Mutanabbi’s poem is a panegyric to the black slave ruler of Ikhshidid Egypt, al-Kafur. The paper will show that the success of this poem as a performative statement lies largely in al-Mutanabbi’s ability to reformulate conventional Arab praise motifs to suit such a ruler. Ibn Khafajah’s poem, by contrast, is a poem of praise and consolation for the death of friends to the Andalusian amir Ibn Zuhr. Although explicitly invoking al-Mutanabbi’s poem through the imitation, these differing circumstances require that the later poet reconceive the poetic themes and structures of the base ode and, in doing so, guarantee both: 1) that it will be performatively successful and 2) that it will be poetically original.