The title for this paper is inspired by Wladimir Ivanow’s "Problems in Nasir-i Khusraw’s Biography," a 1948 monograph that explores the mystique surrounding the eleventh century traveler/poet/philosopher’s persona and biography, a mystique propagated by his supporters, his detractors, and, most notably, by himself. This paper examines the extraordinary autobiographical element of N??ir-i Khusraw’s poetry in comparison and contrast to autobiographical verses by his major literary antecedents, contemporaries, and successors. While many of the odes in N??ir-i Khusraw’s divan can be categorized within the genres of tarjuma-yi ??l (autobiographical poetry, literally the “translation” of a poet’s life or present circumstances into verse) or ?absiy?t (prison poetry), they are exceptional in their apparent aims and audience, as well as in the self-consciousness of their diction, genre, and tone. Specifically, this paper argues that N??ir-i Khusraw is the first major figure in Persian poetry preoccupied with articulating his life story and beliefs in a self-aware, “authentic” poetic language. Where other poets seek to commemorate themselves in the tradition of fakhr (boasting) or, in the case of the ?absiy?t, to remind patrons of their continuing existences as poets, N??ir-i Khusraw composes his divan with the purpose of providing posterity with an apologia that is necessarily both didactic and articulated in an unequivocal language. In that light, this paper also considers the autobiographical strains in the poetry of N??ir’s successors, namely the great Persian Sufi poets: is the intimate, emotional tenor of Persian Sufi poetry a direct extension of the innovations in poetic voice and persona that N??ir-i Khusraw poetry introduced? Is the Sufis’ crucial anxiety over signs and temporality a recapitulation or a corruption of N??ir’s belief in the absolute authenticity of his language and of his claim to be composing poetry simultaneously earthbound and sublime— in his words, “caught beneath the sky?” Part of a larger project on the philosophical poetry of N??ir-i Khusraw, this paper will attempt to situate N??ir’s understanding of autobiography and the poetry within the history and development of classical Persian poetic diction.