Major 20th century political Arab movements and events like Nasserism, Arab nationalism and the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and literary movements like iltizam (Commitment) played a key role in the formation and development of modern Arabic literature. Examining the role of Arab politics in the poetry of prominent 20th century Arab poets like the Egyptian Hijazi, the Iraqi Bayyati and the Palestinian Darwish reveals a great deal of commitment in their poetry. However, their poetry witnesses a transition from commitment to maturity of poetic voice and identity, each in a unique way. This paper focuses mainly on the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish from 1960s to 2005. I argue that Darwish’s poetry witnesses a transition from confrontational, militant and anti-Israeli to a poetry of close interrogation of identity in which the distinction between self and other begins to collapse. This paper compares Darwish’s 1988 poem “Those Who Pass Between the Passing Words” to two of his poems published in 2003: "He is Quiet and so am I" and "She, in the Evening.” This paper addresses the following questions: to what extent has iltizam’s definition of the Arab poet’s role in defending his society by using “his aesthetic weapon, poetry, in the fight against Israel” influenced Darwish’s earlier poetry? How does Darwish represent the self and the other, the enemy, in his earlier poetry and does this representation change in his late poetry? This paper investigates the ways in which this shift/transition affects the perceptions of the self and the other of their mutual conflict and their self-enclosed identities. The paper argues, late poems like "He is Quiet and so am I" and "She, in the Evening” represent a turning point in the poetics of Darw?sh from commitment in its traditional sense to maturity of poetic voice and identity.