Though maintaining close contacts with his family and friends in Tel Aviv and visiting them on vacations, Alterman spent three years in France and was highly influenced by his occasional meetings with French artists and writers.

On the 22nd of August, 1934, he married Rachel Marcus, an actress in "The Cameri Theatre" (Hebrew: התיאטרון הקאמרי) In January 1941 their only daughter was born: Tirtza Atar, who would grow up to become a poet herself.

"[2] In 1934, he began to publish in the daily newspaper Davar a rhymed column named "Tel Aviv Sketches" (Hebrew: סקיצות תל אביביות).

This volume, with its "neo-romantic themes, highly charged texture, and metrical virtuosity,"[3] as Israeli critic Benjamin Harshav puts it, established him as a major force in modern Hebrew literature.

This is a kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria consisting of 31 interconnected poems, all from the viewpoint of the ghost of a dead man obsessed with the living woman he loves – a reversal of the Orpheus and Eurydice story.

[6] In the early stages of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War he wrote numerous patriotic poems, the most well-known of which is "The Silver Platter" (Hebrew: מגש הכסף magásh ha-késef).

Having become a canonical text read on Israel's Remembrance Day, this poem was written in response to Chaim Weizmann's words in December 1947, after the adoption of the UN Partition Plan for Palestine, "No state is ever handed on a silver platter...

Alterman translated Shakespeare, Molière, Racine, Gozzi, Molnar, Lully, Dostoevsky, Bernard Shaw, Ionesco, Courteline, Priestley, Barrie, Anouilh, de Beaumarchais, Jonson, Labiche, Ostrovsky into Hebrew and Yiddish.

During the 1950s, Alterman was opposed to the martial law imposed at the time on Israel's Arab citizens (until 1966), and was also strongly supportive of workers' struggle such as the 1952 sailors' strike which was suppressed by the Ben Gurion Government.

After the Six-Day War, Alterman was one of the founders of the Movement for Greater Israel finding himself in alliance with right-wing activists whom he greatly opposed in earlier times of his career.

He criticized David Ben-Gurion (who only held at the time the position of a Knesset member, but was still influential) for being too willing to give up the territories captured during the war in return for a peace agreement.