The ghazal form is arguably one of the oldest and most beloved genres of the greater Middle East and the Islamicate world. Scholars agree that the first iteration of the ghazal, or proto-ghazal, was adapted from the nasib section of the pre-Islamic, Arabic qasida. The ghazal has since circulated as an independent form in numerous languages including Arabic, Persian, Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi, Turkish, Uighur, Malay, German, and English. This long and multilingual history of the ghazal is, of course, far from uniform and literary practitioners and critics have routinely noted differences in style and practice across regions and ‘periods’. Yet, since the ghazal is also routinely fetishized as one of the most anti-mimetic forms of poetry that was concerned with conventionalized language and metaphor rather than the experiences of its writers -- this is especially true of the sabk-e Hindi model -- literary historiographers have intensely debated the advantages and pitfalls of reading this form historically, rather than transhistorically. The nineteenth-century Urdu reformist movement of naichral shai‘ri or natural poetry is an especially pivotal moment in ghazal criticism on account of its campaign against literary abstraction and the effect that this scholarship had on reorienting multilingual and multiregional models of ghazal history towards more national horizons. This paper will argue that while the natural poetry movement can be read as an attempt to resituate historical and geographical particularity into ghazal practice, the Romantic ideals of natural expression that these writers employed were themselves implicated in newer models of literary universalism that underpinned eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discussions on World Literature.