The story is considered one of the art forms of literature in general, and prose in particular, as it deals with those central topics that impact life. The story also transcends imagination and suspense to then produce artistic creativity. However, this does not mean that it was confined to prose alone; instead, we find that it exceeded that to poetry. Narrative poetry is considered one of the literary genres that have developed in modern Arabic literature; however, it had precursors in ancient Arabic literature, specifically among the pre-Islamic poets, such as ʻAntarah and Zuhayr ibn Abī Salmá in their poetry, although their stories lack the artistic elements on which the story is built. In the Umayyad era, this art is evident from the poet Jamīl Buthaynah, with stories full of declarations of hate for her beloved, who made her wonderful promises of marriage and then disappointed her. In Abbasid poetry, the poetic stories of Abū Nuwās revolve around gatherings of wine and singing, and al-Buḥturī tells the story of a wolf in his poetry. The lyrical poem is one of the manifestations of renewal in modern Arabic poetry and a platform for poets to combine story and poetry. A large number of collections of poets in the contemporary era has been identified. Examples of these stories are produced by the great poets of the modern era, including Aḥmad Shawqī, ʻAbbās Maḥmūd al-ʻAqqād, and Ilyās Faraḥāt. Scholars have differed regarding who has previous credit in this field. Sometimes they count Khalīl Muṭrān as its pioneer, and at other times they include Shiblī almllāṭ as an innovator. If we examine contemporary poetry, especially among the poets of the Renaissance, we will find that these poets dealt with poetic stories. They were distinguished by a unique talent that enabled them to combine these poetry and storytelling engagingly and responsively. Thus, the horizons of the story expanded in contemporary Arabic poetry, and its themes multiplied and its sources diversified, or so I learned from history and legend. The story and its elements continued to be employed by modern poets in their poems, leading to the mixing of narrative and lyrical pieces. Modern poets deal with the narrative structure from the technique of masks of intertextuality or the horror of the free verse poem to the dramatic character in general. Therefore, the importance of narration in modern poetry comes through its deployment of various narrative features. The contemporary poem is no longer confined to one voice, i.e., the poet’s voice, but rather, it hosts different voices. We must recall that the narrative structure does not imply that the poem mutates into a story or a novel, where the poet turns to the elements of the narrative and fictional work and intensifies its impact to include it in their poem, neglecting the technical aspects of the poem, so that its structure is cold and descriptive and is not distinguished by mastery in the distribution of lights and the management of events, moving the characters so that it amounts to a fictional work and is not one of ingenuity, intensity, and focus so that it remains an outstanding poetic work. The poet’s purpose is not the story per se insofar as it functions as a story because the poem does not have graphic or narrative ends. However, it can use narrative elements and operate them in a textual group and for poetic purposes. We do not understand West African poets as skillful storytellers who employ narration elements as novelists do; rather, we need to reveal the extent to which these poets used narrative expression techniques and some of their storytelling processes. Accordingly, we chose some of the poems that contain the features of the story for study. These poems have historical sources to inspire the writing, as the poets took their historical roots from African literature, which depicts the reality of African societies, including events, facts, and legends. This study analyses Afro-Arabic poems from the West African region as a model for the poetic story. A lyrical story is a narration of facts or events in poetry as a story. This type of poetry is significant in Arabic literature produced by African poets during the twentieth century. The aim of addressing this topic was to shed light on the poems of the poetic story written by West African poets, to assess their contributions to this field, and to learn about the topics of these poems, their characteristics, their formal structure, and their artistic values. Accordingly, this research will help researchers to identify the African literary heritage, some of which are still preserved in manuscripts. It will also give them an idea of some historical events in West Africa, their causes, and their consequences. We began the research with an introduction to the poetic story in terms of its concept, origin, importance, elements, and characteristics. Then we moved to the applied side. We discussed the content of fictional poetry in West Africa. We saw that this content is divided the content into three sections by topics at one time and personalities at another time, i.e., religious, realistic, and superstitious. After that, we analyzed the poetic verses in the research both rhetorically and critically. Our study yielded many results, including the work of poetry that ripples through the collections of West African poets as one of the sources of their modern intellectual maturity, often aimed at personal ends. We rarely find them expressed except to satisfy poetic meaning. The lyrical stories we have dealt with in the study have been full of artistic methods and beautiful images that the poets derived from their surrounding environments and cultural stock, employing techniques and ideas to attract the recipients’ attention and develop the dramatic event. The poetic story represents the crossroads of two languages and two images; one is narrative, and the other is poetic. This prompts to assert that literary styles may converge and coexist within a single genre without losing their qualitative specificity, and this is what appeared among the West African poets when they introduced us to the poetic epics they wanted to convey using excellent poetics and outstanding talent. The elements of the story differed in clarity and appearance in the poems of these poets from one verse to another. Among the findings of this study is that the poets of the West African region have contributed a great deal to this art. The Ghanaian poet ʻUmar Karakī (d. 1353¤1934), the poet Jarnū Ibrāhīm Sī (d. 1396¤1976), ʻAbbās Ṣall (d. 1410¤1990) from Senegal, the Malian poet Yaʻqūb Dakūre, the Nigerian Jamīl ʻAbd Allāh, the Gambian Bāmyn Muḥammad Sīrī, and the Guinean Jarnū ʻAlī Boudem and others who have excelled in this art. It has become clear through this study that African poets have dealt with aspects of narration in their poems, treatments that depend on individual poetic skills, and special artistic abilities, for there was no single narrative trajectory in which the creative efforts in the storytelling field were organized.