This paper examines poetic methods of characterizing foreign officials visiting Arab cities. I trace a literary arc beginning in the period of Ottoman decline and “the Arab Renaissance” of the late 18th century, continuing through the current post-revolt era in the Middle East. I counter the popular critical idea that nationalist arts rely upon a self/other binary in order to resonate with their audiences. While such a binary structure applies to much narrative prose, in the field of poetry that I explore in this paper, diplomatic visitors to the Middle East are not precisely foreign. Instead, they emerge as part-Arab interlocutors, whom the poet stations just barely outside an extended conversation with the audience. My study therefore challenges the predominant, overarching theories of self-and-other in Arabic discourse. The dramatic and rhetorical tools of Early Modern Studies provide a superior, more adaptable lens to view poets’ performance of international statesmanship. Whereas the language of self/other issues from an ethnographic account of literary history, we scholars would now profit from more closely analyzing the conditions of literary performance. Arab poets use strategies such as the “dramatic aside” to the audience, recalling Renaissance comedies and Shakespearean dialogue. With it, they evoke the delicacy of formal political negotiation. Marking Kaiser Wilhelm’s 1898 tour of major Levantine and Egyptian cities, the “Prince of Poets” Ahmad Shawqi praises the emperor as an intimate of Saladin, but also asks his modern Arab audiences why they should need a German to teach them about Arab kingship. More than a century later, the television program “Prince of Poets” gives Iraqi writer ‘Abbas Jijan a platform from which to proclaim that Barack Obama has become a kind of African Arab. Although “Prince of Poets” television viewers have appreciated Jijan’s emphasis on Obama’s patrilineal connections to Islamic history, I contend that the poem more subtly recalls Shawqi’s political project with Wilhelm. Giving his bombastic verses historical depth, Jijan makes use of a long series of 20th-century diplomatic poems subsequent to Shawqi’s career. Ultimately, the act of versifying a foreign leader in Arabic relies less upon the familiar ethnographic conceit of “othering” than it does upon venerable dramatic techniques that Middle East scholars neglect. The convention of addressing the audience while pretending to speak directly to a politically powerful visitor, which we generally associate with early modern theatre, helps us to understand current trends in Arabic composition and entertainment.