Biographical dictionaries of early modern Syria, particularly those of Muhammad Amin al-Muhibbi (d. 1699) and Muhammad Khalil al-Muradi (d. 1791) have often been viewed, and as such used, as historical references useful only for locating the social and intellectual coordinates of a particular individual. This paper argues that the primary purpose of these dictionaries was not the creation of a biographical repository, nor was it simply an act of memorialization. Rather, these dictionaries, I argue, served as explorations into the emotional worlds (sensibilities) of the Arabic-speaking learned community, and particularly the emotional world of the Damascene literary and scholarly elite. The paper demonstrates this by a) providing a brief survey of the changes in the nature of Arabic biographical writing from the medieval to the early modern era, focusing particularly on the rise of the use of poetry in biographical dictionaries in Damascus in the long eighteenth century, and b) illustrating how this poetry came to be used, not only for its aesthetic and literary value, but as an evidentiary tool by the biographer. That is, the poetry came to be used as evidence of a biographee's personality and emotional sensibilities. While the paper will focus on the biographical dictionaries of Muhibbi and Muradi, it will also draw on the uses of poetry as a historical and evidentiary tool for the study of personality in other eighteenth-century texts, including travel literature (rihlat/ sing. rihla) and curriculum vitae (athbat/ sing. thabat). In doing so, the paper will also show that throughout the long eighteenth century, during what was an extremely competitive literary and scholarly environment, the Damascene elite were in the process of cultivating and demonstrating a particular emotional sensibility intended to distinguish them from the Ottoman center in Istanbul as well as from other Arabic-speaking cities. Finally, the paper also aims to contribute to the growing scholarship on the cultural history of eighteenth-century Damascus and to serve as grounds for comparison with the historical methodologies developed by Arab historians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.