A poet anticipated close scrutiny of his work and took care to ensure its linguistic and poetic soundness and ethical propriety. But he also relied on his audience to gauge his technical bravado. 15 In particular he assumed their knowledge of themes and motifs, enabling them to identify how much of a line or hemistich came from an existing verse and how he enhanced it by giving it a new form and meaning. The sariqa 'theft' or akhdh 'taking over', as well as talmf~ 'allusion' and taqmfn 'quotation' by which modern poets referred to each other and the ancients formed an integral part of Abbasid poetry, designed for an audience steeped in the classical tradition. Borrowing was then not frowned upon in general, but depended in each case on how elegantly a poet appropriated and recast a sariqa in his own verse.