The idea for organizing this panel came about after this author was unexpectedly unable to present a paper at the 2009 MESA meeting because of illness. The present study is a revision and an expansion of that original paper; it has yet to be presented or published. It is part of a larger monographic project on the 11th century thinker Nasir-i Khusraw that seeks to unravel his theory of sukhan--speech, language, Logos, or the Word--particularly with respect to poetic language and the poet's use of it. Central to the paper at hand is Nasir-i Khusraw's unique engagement of the self, a subject of enonciation wholly different from the ingenuous observer of his Safarnama (The Travelogue), for example, or the meticulous rationalist of Gushayish u Rahayish (Liberation and Freedom). By setting his philosophy, teachings and autobiography in a poetic/intuitive language, Nasir frees himself to reveal a depth of emotion and awareness of self absent in his other writings. The result, this paper argues, is a radical rendering of self: the conscious self, the knowing subject, transformed into a creating self with the possibility of emotional, as well as intellectual, transcendence. Poetry for Nasir-i Khusraw thus transforms both knowledge of things and the knower himself into a privileged creator; in that vain, as a sort of literary tessellation of didactics and self-vindication, Nasir's odes become his collective apologia. This paper utilizes the language and analytic perspectives of classical and modern European critical theory to explain how and why N?ir-i Khusraw places himself in his poetry. N. ir-i Khusraw's notion of composition and composer was indeed unique to Persian poetic composition at his time, and this paper also marks his divan as the provenance for the technical, allusive language that would become one of the defining features of classical Persian poetry.