Maya Jaggi, writing for The Guardian stated "He led a modernist revolution in the second half of the 20th century, "exerting a seismic influence" on Arabic poetry comparable to T.S.

[5] Born to a modest Alawite farming family[6] in January 1930, Adonis hails from the village of al-Qassabin near the city of Latakia in western Syria.

In 1944, despite the animosity of the village chief and his father's reluctance, the young poet managed to recite one of his poems before Shukri al-Quwatli, the president of the newly-established Republic of Syria, who was on a visit to al-Qassabin.

[8] While serving in the military in 1955–56, Adonis was imprisoned for his membership in the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (following the assassination of Adnan al-Malki), Led by Antoun Saadeh, the SSNP had opposed European colonization of Greater Syria and its partition into smaller nations.

The party advocated a secular, national (not strictly Arab) approach toward transforming Greater Syria into a progressive society governed by consensus and providing equal rights to all, regardless of ethnicity or sect.

With his use of Sufi terms (the technical meanings of which were implied rather than explicit), Adonis became a leading exponent of the Neo-Sufi trend in modern Arabic poetry, which took hold in the 1970s.

While in Syria, Adonis helped edit the cultural supplement of the newspaper Al-Thawra, but pro-government writers clashed with his agenda and forced him to flee the country.

Also responding to a growing mandate that poetry and literature be committed to the immediate political needs of the Arab nation and the masses, Adonis and Shiʿr energetically opposed the recruitment of poets and writers into propagandist efforts.

Poetry, he argued, must remain a realm in which language and ideas are examined, reshaped, and refined, in which the poet refuses to descend to the level of daily expediencies.

Adonis wanted in Mawqaif to enlarge the focus of Shiʿr by addressing the politics and the illusions of the Arab nations after their defeat in the Six-Day War, believing that literature by itself cannot achieve the renewal of society and that it should be related to a more comprehensive revolutionary movement of renovation on all levels.

A number of literary figures later joined and contributed to Mawaqif, including Elias Khoury, Hisham Sharabi and Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish among others.

[22] Adonis also founded and edited Al-Akhar (English: "The Other"), a magazine dedicated to publishing original content as well as numerous literary translations of contemporary essays on philosophy and Arabism.

It expressed concern with structural impediments to the spreading of progress and freedom in the Arab world, and included writers such as Ahmed Barqawi and Mustafa Safwan.

[24] More than an olive tree, more than a river, more than a breeze bounding and rebounding, more than an island, more than a forest, a cloud that skims across his leisurely path all and more in their solitude are reading his book.

These three astonishing poems, written out of the crises in Arabic society and culture following the disastrous 1967 Six-Day War and as a stunning decrepitude against intellectual aridity, opened out a new path for contemporary poetry.

Adonis is hard at work undermining the social discourse that has turned catastrophe into a firmer bond with dogma and cynical defeatism throughout the Arab world.

Between such fruits and death survives an engineering trick: New York, Call it a city on four legs heading for murder while the drowned already moan in the distance.

Al-Kitab provides a large lyric-mural rather than an epic that attempts to render the political, cultural, and religious complexity of almost fifteen centuries of Arab civilization.

[35] Translated from Arabic by Khaled Mattawa and described as "a genuine overview of the span of Adonis's",[36] this collection contains a number of poems of between five and fifteen or so pages in length.

The history of Arabic poetry, he argues, has been that of the conservative vision of literature and society (al-thabit), quelling poetic experimentation and philosophical and religious ideas (al-mutahawil).

Al-thabit, or static current, manifests itself in the triumph of naql (conveyance) over 'aql (original, independent thought); in the attempt to make literature a servant of religion; and in the reverence accorded to the past whereby language and poetics were essentially Quranic in their source and therefore not subject to change.

The second concern, that of particularity (khuṣūṣiyyah), is a telling reflection of the realization among writers and critics throughout the Arabic-speaking world that the region they inhabited was both vast and variegated (with Europe to the north and west as a living example).

Debate over this issue, while acknowledging notions of some sense of Arab unity, revealed the need for each nation and region to investigate the cultural demands of the present in more local and particular terms.

A deeper knowledge of the relationship between the local present and its own unique version of the past promises to furnish a sense of identity and particularity that, when combined with similar entities from other Arabic-speaking regions, will illustrate the immensely rich and diverse tradition of which 21st-century litterateurs are the heirs.

[45] On 19 May 2014 Salwa Zeidan Gallery in Abu Dhabi, was home to another noted exhibition by Adonis: Muallaqat[46] (in reference to the original pre-Islamic era literary works Mu'allaqat), consisted of 10 calligraphy drawings of big format (150x50cm).

[47] A known critic of Islamic religious values and traditions, who describes himself as a non-religious person,[48] Adonis has previously received a number of death threats in consequence of his denouncement by the well-known Egyptian Salafi sheikh Mohamad Said Raslan who accused him of leaving his Muslim name (Ali) and taking a pagan name, in a circulated video[49] he accused him as well of being a warrior against Islam and demanded his books to be banned describing him as a thing and an infidel.

"[57] On 14 June 2011, amid the bloody crackdown on the Syrian uprising, Adonis wrote an open letter[58] to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir- "as a citizen" he stresses.

Describing Syria as a brutal police state, he attacked the ruling Ba'ath Party, called on the president to step down, and warned that "you cannot imprison an entire nation".

I was among the first to criticise the Ba'ath Party, because I'm against an ideology based on a singleness of ideas.Adonis said on the subject: What's really absurd is that the Arab opposition to dictators refuses any critique; it's a vicious circle.

A visionary who has profound respect for the past, Adonis has articulated his cherished themes of identity, memory and exile in achingly beautiful verse, while his work as critic and translator makes him a living bridge between cultures.