This is principally an essay about a genre-shift in poetry and why that matters. It is also about the diffi cult relation of aesthetics and politics as lived by one poet. It will get around to questions of the postcolonial eventually; the postponement being partly based on the assumption that the colonized nature of Palestine does not need to be urgently argued for. First of all, however, it is necessary to offer a brief introduction on the context of Darwish’s intervention, and why it has particular signifi cance within Arabic culture, in a way in which it would not in European or Western culture, not least because of the widely reiterated belief that, as Darwish puts it, “Poetry is the Arabic art par excellence” (Darwish 1999: 10). That introduction, combined with the necessary discussion of the epic context, means that a more detailed examination of Darwish’s poetry will be slightly delayed.