What is the classical Arabic literary canon? Does such a thing even exist? We tend to take the existence of the canon for granted, yet such a nebulous concept is notoriously difficult to define and delimit. A so-called ‘classical’ literary canon is even more problematic; the classical canon is comprised of a very select number of works whose ‘canonical’ status presumably remains more or less fixed for centuries, or even millennia. This paper aims to take a step back from some of these common assumptions and reconsider the existence and nature of the classical Arabic literary canon: what it is, how it was constructed, and the ways in which it evolves over time. Using the ‘canonical’ Naqāʾiḍ poetry of the Umayyad-era poets Jarīr (d. 111/729) and al-Farazdaq (d. 110/728) as a starting point and case study, this paper will trace the trajectory of this well-known (but seemingly little-read, at least in the modern era) poetic corpus from the time of its original composition to the present day in order to shed light on the following questions: what makes a work of literature canonical in its own time? What were the processes of selection at work in the canonization of a particular classical Arabic poet, author, or dīwān? Once canonized, how does a work maintain its canonical status, sometimes for hundreds of years? And how can scholars today work with, think through, and redefine the classical canon? While this paper does not propose to provide any definitive answers to these sweeping questions, it will suggest that the classical Arabic literary canon was initially and continues to be a literary, political, and sociocultural phenomenon that serves as a repository for a limited body of literary works that were carefully selected to act as a form of enduring cultural memory, more or less impervious to the passage of time. The names and works that make up the classical Arabic literary canon may have remained relatively stable for centuries, but the purposes for which the memories that these works embody are employed change and fluctuate over time.