The growing body of published, critical editions of Persian tazkirahs (‘Poetic Remembrances’) has brought fresh possibilities within the reach of historians of the literary tradition. Assessing the dynamics and potentials of the genre itself is an increasingly plausible task, as is tracing the development of how individual poets and certain poetic styles were remembered and contested. My paper pursues the latter ambition, examining the fluctuating legacy of the Safavid poet, Mirza Jalal Asir (d.1639), as recorded in the tazkirah literature. Asir was a well-connected member of the Safavid elite, based in its capital, Isfahan, and reportedly married to a daughter of Shah ‘Abbas himself. But beyond these basic facts, we learn little about his life from the tazkirahs written in the century following his death. Rather, tazkirah writers of the 17th and early-18th centuries seemed increasingly concerned with contesting his innovative and notoriously abstruse poetry, dubbed by many as exemplary of the tarz-i khayal, or “imaginative style”. Complex and cerebral to some, merely the incomprehensible ramblings of a drunkard to others, Asir’s verse achieved a great deal of influence over the next century, acquiring admirers and imitators across the Persianate world. My paper will explore the role played by tazkirah writers in codifying the tarz-i khayal, interrogating the interplay of biography, association, persona, and literary criticism in efforts to both canonise and marginalise the style of poetry he came to represent. In doing so, we shall see how the discussion of Asir’s verse reflects a wider discourse in the early modern Persian literary community, as well as evidencing the expanding function of the tazkirah genre itself.