Sa‘di is revered as the most prominent lyric poet of medieval Iran. He flourished during the second half of the 13th century and was politically attached to both the elites ruling over Fars (in southern Iran) and the Mongol dynasty, which, upon the downfall of the Abbasid Caliphate, controlled the entirety of the Iranian plateau from its new capital, Tabriz. For decades, the tendency of reading Sa‘di’s poetry within the misleading scope of the mystical discourse has reduced the sensual richness of his lyric texts (ghazals) to a level of pure spirituality, in which the beloved is represented as an abstracted representation of God. On the other hand, exclusively mundane interpretations have often dismissed the relevance of the theo-erotic discourse that characterizes Sa‘di’s representation of human beauty as a sign to access the supernal world by the noetic means of the internal senses. With this talk, I set out to introduce the Avicennian background of the psychology of creative imagination that determines the multifaceted nature of Sa‘di’s poetic approach to the relationship between the contemplation of the physical world and the metaphysics of the visionary experience. In particular, I will show how the Avicennian psychological background can offer powerful analytical tools to explore the influence that al-Ghazāli’s spiritual cardiology exerted on the aesthetics of “beholding beauty” as the primary focus of Sa‘di’s lyric innovations.