Al-Bu?turī devoted his early poetry, written between the ages of 16 and 19, to his tribe, the ?ayyi?. Sometime after 840 he came to the attention of the prominent poet Abū Tammām, who encouraged his panegyrics and brought him to the caliphal capital of Baghdad. Al-Bu?turī met with little success there and returned to Syria in 844. On his second visit to Baghdad, c. 848, he was introduced to the caliph, al-Mutawakkil, and thus launched a court career, notorious for its opportunism and greed, which enjoyed the patronage of successive caliphs, through al-Mu?ta?id. In 892 he went to Egypt as court poet to its ruler and finally returned to his birthplace, where he died in 897.

The majority of al-Bu?turī's poems, produced during his years as court poet, are panegyrics, famed for their finely conceived and detailed descriptions and their musicality of tone. Those written during the early part of his career are historically valuable for the allusions they make to contemporary events. Like his mentor Abū Tammām, al-Bu?turī wrote a ?amāsah, an anthology of early Arabic verse, but it was only mildly successful.