In Shīr Khān Lodī’s biographical poetry anthology titled Mir'at al-khayāl (“The Mirror of Imagination,” 1690/91), short treatises on Islamicate sciences and arts interspersed between the entries occupy as much space as the biography of the poets and samples of their poetry. With topics ranging from the art of speech to calligraphy and music, from demonology to dream interpretation and breath control, from geography to medicine and ethics, these treatises were dismissed by such a specialist as the Iranian scholar Gulchīn-i Maʿānī as irrelevant to the objective of taẕkiras. The present paper offers a fresh look at the Mir'at al-khayāl by examining both of its components not in isolation but rather in relation to each other. Lodī’s focus on contemporary poets, including the less known local literati of the eastern fringes of the Mughal Empire where he served for some years before entering the service of the high-ranking Mughal nobleman Navvāb Shukr Allāh Khān in Delhi and its environs in 1679, allows us to reassess the extent and the modus operandi of literary networks within the empire. The subjects of Lodī’s short treatises and their placement under specific entries in the taẕkira, on the other hand, reveal much about both the breadth of learning and the intellectual, artistic, and spiritual pursuit of the literary elite. As a whole, Lodī’s taẕkira, despite its conciseness, provides a fascinating window into the circulation of ideas, texts, and trends via intersecting and overlapping networks and intellectual genealogies in the late Mughal era.