For my Master thesis I studied the personal archive of the Egyptian poet Husayn ‘Afif (1902-1979), an avant-garde romantic poet, who had experimented with prose poetic text models, adopting the form of the so-called “al-shi‘r al-manthur”, since the beginning of the 1930s. As a romantic poet, ‘Afif had been active and interactive with several literary groups; above all, the Apollo group, known for its modernist approach towards poetic innovation. He had also published more than ten prose poetic collections - including two poetic theater plays and one novel - over his lifetime. Nonetheless, ?Afif gets marginalized or mentioned as an “unknown” poet in the mainstream historical narrative about modern Arabic poetry. However, the contrast between the size of his legacy on the one hand, and the absence of his name, or the lack of accurate information about his literary contribution on the other hand, leads one to question paradoxes that occur within the historical narrative not only about this particular poet, but also about al-shi’r al-manthur as a literary/poetic form. In that respect, my ambition, which at first did not exceed the documentation of ‘Afif’s archive material and answering the question of his presence within his contemporaneous literary scene, eventually expanded to search for the controversial literary form he had adopted, and to question the difficulty of positioning it within the historical narrative about modern Arabic poetry. Moreover, although some of the literary magazines found in this private archive, such as Apollo, al-Hilal, al-Risala, al-Thaqafa, and al-Majalla al-Jadida for example, are well known - to the public, as well as to specialized researchers – the material, draws attention to the role of the literary press of the time, and points to a variety of literary periodicals, which - similar to ‘Afif - could be described nowadays as "unknown". A closer look at those magazines, raises more questions about interrelations within the literary community of the 1930s and 1940s; a significant era in regards to the formation of literary groups, centering periodicals that represented their views and literary approaches, as well as the textual manifestations of those approaches in different newly introduced literary and poetic forms. It was, thus, inevitable to reconsider the historicity of this material and to think of the interrelations that govern the cultural discourse and the process of history writing, which carries in it the canonization as well as the marginalization of particular literary models.