The Philosopher and Historian, Ibn Khaldun writes on his encounter with Timur that he is “one of the greatest and mightiest of kings. Some attribute to him knowledge, others attribute to him heresy […] but in all this there is nothing; it is simply that he is highly intelligent and very perspicacious […] He is one favored by Allah – the power is Allah’s, and he grants it to whom he chooses of his creatures.” Timur’s conquests and his historiographical and literary persona were at the center of numerous literary, historical, and encyclopedic works from Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia in the ninth/fifteenth and tenth/sixteenth centuries. Poetic works on his life mirror Ibn Khaldun’s impression of Timur by depicting him as a perspicacious king but also as a man endowed with divine providence. Timur’s literary persona became an embodied image of power in its rhetorical, cosmic, and political dimensions. These depictions offer a metapoetic reflection on the role of poetry in depicting the relationships between divine, discursive, and political power. In this paper, I will be turning to two retellings of Timur’s life. One of them is Abd-Allah Hatifi’s illustrated Masnavi, the Zafarnameh, written in the Timurid Empire on the ninth/fifteenth century. The other work is Christopher Marlowe’s epic tragedy, Tamburlaine the Great, from the tenth/sixteenth century. I argue that in both works, Timur becomes a mirror image which reflects the relationship between political and divine power in Islamic and Christian understandings of poetic and visual discourse. The simultaneous engagement of poetic and visual discourse is theorized by both Aristotle and Al-Farabi’s Poetics as products of mimesis and/or the excitement of the imaginative faculty (al-khayal), respectively. Therefore, the paper suggests that by engaging particular forms of visual and poetic discourse, both poets showcase the religious role of Epic poetry through the depiction of kingship in relation to the cosmos, including the divine and the world.