Later in life, Khaqani wrote a poem in his praise, in which he used the similarity of his uncle's name and that of Omar Khayyam to compare their virtues.

[6] Some traditional stories describe him as being the pupil and son-in-law of the famed poet Abul-Ala Ganjavi, however, this is not corroborated by Khaqani's own writings.

Khaqani was condemned to a number of subsequent imprisonments, until in 1156-7 he succeeded in escaping and setting out on a lengthy expedition through the Middle East.

[6] He also composed his famous qasida The Portals at Madāʾen, in which the contemplation of Taq-i Kisra (the ruins of the Sassanid Palace near Ctesiphon), according to Beelaert (2010) "elicits a warning about the transience of royal courts.

To memorialize his incarceration in verse, Khaqani composed his most powerful anti-feudal poems in a genre that will later become known as habsiyāt (prison poetry).

His other famous work, Tohfat al-ʿErāqayn, originally titled Khatm al-gharāʾeb ("Curious Rarities"), is written in couplet form (mathnawi) and is over three thousand verses long.

According to Minorsky the poems "bristle with rare words, unusual similes and allusions to astrology, medicine, theology, history, to say nothing of the numerous hints concerning happenings of the poet's own life and time".

[5] Ali Dashti referred to him as "the inaccessible poet" and contrasted the difficulty of Khaqani's poems to the simplicity of Saadi's poetry.

[4] The genre has been described as the "medieval Islamic world's most aesthetically compelling corpus of texts dealing with incarceration.

[6] It is believed that the work of figures such as Omar Khayyam, al-Maʿarri, Unsuri, Masud Sa'd Salman, and Sanai were parts of Khaqani's literary background.