[3] In order to pursue his career, Marwan left his family's home for Baghdad, where he quickly rose to prominence in the court circles.
[2] Marwan knew to take advantage of his position and manage his image: the specialist of Arab poetry Jamel Eddine Bencheikh [fr] describes him as "sordidly avaricious, clumsy and unscrupulous, he would arrive at the palace clad in rags, despite the enormous sums which the caliphs gave him for his poems.
[2][3] The story that his assassin was an Alid supporter angry about his attacks on their claims to the caliphate may be apocryphal, but as the historian H. Kilpatrick notes, it nevertheless "suggests the impact that his poetry had".
[2] Bencheikh considers Marwan "a great classical poet" and "a master of the well-turned utterance", with a "supple and lexically straightforward vocabulary" and "clear syntax" that lent themselves to striking formulations in his panegyrics.
[2] Indeed, his knowledge of Arabic was deficient; the strict philologist al-Asma'i (d. 828/833) scorned him as a half-Arab (muwallad) who never properly learned the language, and anecdotes tell of his giving incorrect explanations of words.