In this presentation, I will analyze and historicize the most prominent medium of Arabic poetry encoding, the collection, as part of a wider argument about the mediated lives (or forms of existence) that Classical Arabic poetry takes. To do this, I will bring together a few key examples of early Diwans and poetry anthologies alongside less canonical examples from later periods of Arabic literary history and from outside the core Arabic-speaking areas. Returning to manuscripts, I will ask how and for whom Arabic poetry came to be organized in a series of well established formats in the formative period of pre-modern Arabic scholarship. In pre-modern and modern scholarship, Classical Arabic poetry is most often understood against the background of biography or literary-history. In my new research, I put forward a media history of Arabic poetry in order to understand more fully and empirically how the history of Arabic poetry as a social text and language artform intersected with media technologies and informed their development. The aesthetics of Arabic poetry is influenced by the collecting passions of its early systematizers and we can trace the resilience of this aesthetic drive over the genre’s history. We can also identify an epistemological resonance to this collecting passion in the long and dynamic history of performance archiving in Classical Arabic and its vibrant commentary culture.