This paper takes as its starting point the problem modern scholarship has had in classifying the 11th century poet/philosopher/traveller Nasir-i Khusraw within the pantheon of classical Persian poets. A particular problem is the contention that he is merely a didactic poet or a poet of versified philosophy lacking in ‘poetical feeling.’ I shall attempt to prove that Nasir Khusraw’s odes are his collective apologia, an imaging of self as a complex imbrication of didactics and vindication held together by the intensity of language and feeling that poetry necessarily provides. Central to this thesis will be the task of unravelling Nasir’s theory of sukhan— speech, language, or Logos— in the qasidas with respect to poetic language and the poet’s use of it. Certainly for an eleventh century Persian of Nasir-i Khusraw's lofty station and education, poetry was the highest form of expression. Nasir often discusses the function of poetry and of the poet in the qasidas by ironically playing with and mocking the conventions of the form and revealing an ever-present self-awareness; ultimately, the purpose of the qasida (literally, "purposive poem") for him becomes not just to commemorate himself, as it partially is for the court poets he so despises, but also to incarnate his life and self with an emotive immediacy and a technical, allusive language that prose simply cannot provide him. The result is a radical rendering of speaker, form and meaning. Nasir's theory of poetry and the poet, in apposition to corresponding and contrasting notions in modern European criticism, will together form an analytical lens with which to examine this rendering. Finally, I shall briefly trace Nasir-i Khusraw’s influence on classical Persian poetry with respect to the character of the philosopher/poet. He is indeed the precursor to the Sufi whose poetry is the physical link between the worlds of the unseen and the unseen and the ecstatic complaint of a union severed. Thus for Nasir-i Khusraw, poetic composition transforms not just knowledge of things, but also the knower himself into a feeling, thinking, privileged self grappling with and exposing the truths of human existence. Nasir's notion of composition and composer was unique in the Persian poetry of his time and was indeed continually reinterpreted and corrupted over the ensuing centuries of Persian poetry.