“Look behind you, Orpheus, learn how to walk in the world.” This imperative, taken from Adunis’ seminal 1961 collection Songs of Mihyar the Damascene, provides a preliminary glimpse of the complex role of intertextuality in Adunis’ early poetry. The intertextual moments in Mihyar are rarely simply allusive, but rather deeply transformative: a pseudo-Mohammad is hung and burned by his own partisans in Medina; the stone pursues Sisyphus; Adam denies the Garden. The mythic, religious, literary, and historical allusions in Mihyar have mostly been read in accordance with Adunis’ large body of literary and cultural criticism. At best, this lens adds a layer to interpretations of his poetry. At worst, in the case of Mihyar, it leads to skewed retroactive readings of the work. In this paper, I argue that the poetry of Mihyar resists the temptation to fall into the often overly simplistic binary distinctions that inform much of Adunis’ later criticism, specifically his 3-volume dissertation The Static and the Dynamic (1974, 1977, 1978). The static-dynamic dichotomy (together with the parallel dichotomies of conformity-innovation and imitation-creation) leads to one glaring irony that is not discussed in the dissertation: In using the derogatory term “static” to label such a large number of complex Arab thinkers, Adunis risks falling into the same mode of narrow, inflexible interpretation that he himself condemns. My reading of Mihyar thus challenges the pejorative notion of ‘imitative tradition’ (taqlîd) that the critic Adunis employs in binary opposition to the more positive ‘heritage’ (turâth), a term closely aligned with T.S. Eliot’s conception of tradition as presented in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” By examining several key intertextual moments in Mihyar, I argue that this poetry—through extraordinarily destabilizing evocations of seemingly stable cultural signifiers—implicitly calls into question the very possibility of ever successfully establishing the kind of binarisms that we find in Adunis’ dissertation.