During the 2011 Yemeni uprising, demonstrators in Sana’a hoisted placards featuring the image of Muḥammad Maḥmūd al-Zubayrī (d. 1965), a pre-eminent figure of the republican revolution against the Zaydī Imāmate of North Yemen in 1962 whose ardent, socially committed odes (Ar. qaṣīda) called for the establishment of a modern and progressive state (Bonnefoy, “The Structuration of the Yemeni Revolution”, 2012). While non-Yemeni scholars generally relegate al-Zubayrī’s poetic craft to the margins of his national service, Yemenis view his poetic works as central to it; indeed, his adoption of a modern poetic mode is inextricably linked to his actions and advocacy on behalf of a modern Yemeni republic (al-Maqāliḥ, al-Zubayrī: Ḍamīr al-yaman al-thaqāfī wa-l-waṭanī, 1986). This paper places al-Zubayrī’s published poetic collections, Revolution of Poetry (1962) and A Prayer in Hell (1964), within the broader context of Yemeni folk poetry and reflects it against the longstanding tradition of composition and performance of oral and written qaṣīdas (Caton, Peaks of Yemen I Summon, 1990). My purpose is to interrogate the notions of “modernity” that is so thoroughly linked to the poetic oeuvre of al-Zubayrī, and by extension, his prescription for a modern Yemeni republic. In linking al-Zubayrī historically and aesthetically to nationalist poets from elsewhere in the Arab world such as Aḥmad Shawqī, Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm, and Ma’rūf al-Ruṣāfī, (al-Qirshī, Shiʿr al-Zubayrī: Bayn al-naqd al-ʾadabī wa-ʾawhām al-takrīm, 1990), al-Zubayrī is acknowledged as a poet in the “neo-classical” vein, that is to say, a modern poet seeking inspiration in classical Arabic poetic antecedents (Haydar, “What is Modern About Modern Arabic Poetry”, 1981). Such a view overlooks the fact that the Yemeni popular poetic tradition does not acknowledge any discontinuity between a “now” and “then”; as a result, Yemen’s poetic culture obviates the need for a neo-classical stage in its evolution towards a modernist practice and aesthetic. By treating al-Zubayrī as a participant in an ongoing Yemeni folk poetic tradition – not as a “neo-classical” pre-modernist poet – we can recognize the popular, indigenous roots of the Yemeni nationalist qaṣīda and thus, the rhetorical underpinnings of the Yemeni republic itself. In short, my paper urges a look towards popular Yemeni practices rather than imported concepts of foreign modernity as the seedbed of Yemen’s mid-20th century revolution.