The idea of a canon of classical poetry has always hovered around Persian literature studies. When the academic field was founded over a century ago, with the works of Ethé and Browne, one unexamined assumption was that there exists a canon of great poets from the course of a millennium—authors whose works are acknowledged as defining the tradition. More recently, scholars such as Shafi‘i-Kadkani and Losensky have challenged this assumption. We now understand, for example, that early scholars like Browne were influenced by an Iranian nationalist perspective on the literary tradition, which led them to downplay the contributions of the Persian poets of Mughal India. But a number of open questions remain, two of which inspire this paper. First, what are we to make of the relatively coherent, and largely unchallenged, canon of poets from the early centuries (ca. 900 CE through at least the death of Hafiz in 1390)? Second, how might we use biographical dictionaries of poets (tazkirahs) as primary sources on canon formation? This paper will focus on the Persian canon as reflected in one unusually transparent text: ‘Abd al-Rahman Jami’s Baharistan (comp. 1487), a wide-ranging work that the poet wrote for the education of his own son. Its seventh chapter is a concise tazkirah—effectively a syllabus for a young member of the Timurid élite to gain familiarity with the great poets of prior centuries. To analyze the Baharistan from this angle, we may take advantage of more developed scholarship on the Western canon. In particular, sociologist John Guillory has used university literature syllabi as sources on the canon’s evolution. This paper will argue that the Baharistan may be leveraged in a similar way. Furthermore, just as Bourdieu’s idea of “cultural capital” has become influential in studies of the Western canon, it may be applied to the Persian tradition. Jami, it will be argued, provides us with a reflection of what Timurid élites considered their inherited canon of Persian poets—a grouping that has largely continued to be accepted up to the present. Defining this canon would give members of the literate classes a shared sense of the body of poetry that they were expected to know, as part of their cultural capital. And this should be a familiar idea, for Thackston and other historians have often remarked upon the importance of a comprehensive education to the Timurids.