Syrian-Lebanese poet and translator Fu’ad Rifqa (1930-2011) composed an extensive corpus of philosophical poetry and translations of German Romantic poetry into Arabic. Though his poetry has been widely translated into German, his work has gone largely untranslated into English. Rifqa has been peripheral to discussion of Shi?r within critical circles as well, despite his significant early involvement with Shi?r. Rifqa’s compact poetry often creates environments in which a solitary individual meditates in the wilderness before ultimately dissolving into the atmosphere. Each poetic narrative differs only slightly from those prior, but when viewed closely, a trajectory of ideological transition and mediation of conflicting influences can be read through his treatment of the relationship between the individual and the landscape. Anxious individuals in claustrophobic landscapes characterize his early poetry, which was published in the first three issues of Shi?r and bore the influence of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party’s irredentist political and cultural agenda. However isolated the subjects of his poetry appear, the evolution of Rifqa’s poetry over time foregrounds the importance of civic institutions in helping to disentangle public discourse from exclusively political uses. Mediation of three different modes of communication about German thought in Lebanon—the educational mode of the philosophy program at the American University of Beirut, the cultural diplomatic mode of the Goethe Institut in Beirut, and the political mode of the SSNP—contribute to Rifqa’s eventual development of phenomenological poetry in Arabic, as does his doctoral study of Heidegger at the University of Tübingen in the early 1960s. Following his MA in Philosophy at AUB, his break with the party, and move to Germany in 1961, Rifqa’s poetry reflects Germanic landscapes and speaks directly of and to German predecessors, often neglecting contemporary Arabic poets. Rifqa continues to revise his theme and, in the 1980s, achieves a productive synthesis of German and Arabic influences through his poetic journal experiments. His mature poetry intertextually engages both Arab and German poets in environments that invoke Rilke’s concept of “the Open” to explore Christian Existentialist themes.