One of widespread phenomena that scholars of Andalusian Arabic poetry have noted is that of Andalusian poets composing mu'aradat (contrafactions or imitations using the same rhyme and meter) of the works of the master poets of the Abbasid era. Arabic literary scholarship to date has not explored the nature of the poetics of such imitations, that is, the way the later poet draws on the base poem while at the same time trying to produce an original literary work. My study aims to investigate this issue through a close examination of one pair of poems: the Abbasid master-poet Abu Tammam's (d.231/846) famous victory and panegyric ode "Swords [Turn out] to be more Correct than Letters are" and a victory and panegyric imitation of it, "for Enemy is no Protection but Flight," by the Andalusian poet, Marwan ibn 'Abd al-Rahm?n (known as al-Sharif al-Taliq) (d. 400/1010). Employing speech act theory, the paper shows that the later poet intentionally distinguishes his imitation and differentiates it from the model poem in order to respond to his own political context. He must make his poem a successful performative statement by taking the circumstances and convention into account and being appropriate with them. The paper will argue that, in light of speech act theory, that the structural and thematic differences between the two poems can be understood as each poet's response to his particular political and poetic circumstance and, further, that if each poet had not made the choices he did, the poems would not have been successful performative statements.