A growing number of scholars have examined new ways of understanding material, institutional, social, and intellectual transformation within and across empires by focusing on forms of mobility and migration as an analytical lens in the recent decades. Immobility is the hidden counterpart of mobility, which this paper understands not as staying behind or an enforced inability to move, but as stasis. Stasis may refer to a state in equilibrium as well as civil strife. Yet, particularly through the eyes of intellectuals in an unevenly modernizing empire, such as the Ottoman Empire, stasis should be understood as a perception of immobility, inertia, and even apathy or disinterest toward a project of modernization. By a close reading of select qasidas (odes) of Ma‘ruf al-Rusafi (1875-1945) and Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi (1863-1936) in dialogue with the historical transformation in Ottoman domains at the turn of the twentieth century, this paper investigates their perception of stasis in Ottoman Baghdad as manifested in their literary production and illustrates the ways in which modern Arabic neoclassical poetry could be used as a historical source. During the late-Ottoman period in Iraq, intellectuals reflected on what they perceived as stasis pervading Iraqi cities, Iraqi people, and Iraqi lives through lines of poetry. There was widespread censorship in the Ottoman press, curtailing incendiary political language, which made poetry and its symbolism a natural outlet for intellectuals’ political reflection. The Baghdadi poets Ma‘ruf al-Rusafi and Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi critiqued this stasis of Ottoman Baghdadi society through their Arabic poetry and provided insights into why this stagnation had arisen. Both al-Rusafi and al-Zahawi had spent time in Istanbul, and other Arab cities on the Eastern Mediterranean. Their travels brought them into contact with other like-minded intellectuals and poets. Additionally, both men were in Istanbul during the 1908 Young Turk Revolution that brought the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) to power and forced the restoration of the Ottoman constitution and parliament. Witnessing this revolutionary occasion and their quotidian—but no less transformative—modern experiences in the cafés and nightclubs of Istanbul returned with them to Baghdad. Having traveled elsewhere and then returning to Baghdad to see it had not changed, and having observed the inertia toward reform and modernizing in Baghdad, al-Zahawi and al-Rusafi performed poetic social critiques that discussed how the very lack of movement was leaving Baghdadis behind the rest of the empire.