This paper examines the relationship between the biographies of poets and conceptualizations of poetry itself in Maliha Samarqandi’s Muzakkir al-ashab (Samarqand, 1688-9). Muzakkir al-ashab is a tazkira: a commemorative work that combines accounts of poets’ lives with excerpts from their poetry. I argue that rather than setting a fixed definition or standard for poetry in the text, Maliha writes of poetry in varying ways that are responsive to and appropriate for the individual poets whom he commemorates. To explore this question, I analyze aspects of the text including the terminology for poetry, markers of poetic excellence, figurative language to evoke the poetic, and the socially specific sites of poetic exchanges. I also note connections between Muzakkir al-ashab’s accounts of poets and other intertextually related, contemporaneous works, including Tazkira-yi Nasrabadi (1680), by Mirza Muhammad Tahir Nasrabadi (whom Maliha met in Isfahan) and `Ubaydullah-nama (1716), a history by Muhammad-Amin Bukhari. Like all other tazkiras composed in Transoxiana in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the commemorative intent of Muzakkir al-ashab focuses on the author’s contemporaries and acquaintances. However, a self-conscious point of departure from the tazkiras that Maliha invokes as predecessors is his desire to be comprehensive; hence, he anticipates criticisms for the inclusion of poets that others will find to be unworthy. Maliha’s inclusivity resonates with a trend that modern scholarship has identified in Persian poetry in this period, namely, the increased spread of poetic practices through society, and especially the prominence of craftsmen among poets and audiences. The implications of this expansion are contested in scholarship. Does it represent a decline, with a loss of standards? Or is it a favorable development, involving greater freedom and inventiveness of expression away from court strictures? Or, against both of these interpretations, is it mistaken to assume that wider variety in the social locations of poets must alter poetic standards? My paper contributes to these debates by noting the inadvisability of attempting to establish a single, fixed concept of poetry in Muzakkir al-ashab, given the ways in which the poetic is imagined differently through the different personae of poets.