In January of 1957, the first issue of Shi’r (Poetry)—a quarterly founded by Yusuf al-Khal (1917-1987) and members of his poetic circle, tajammu’ shi’r—was published in Beirut. By the time this “journal for modern poetry” (al-shi’r al-hadith) closed permanently in 1970, it had been banned by multiple Arab states and accused of serving as the front for a conspiracy led by the Syrian National Socialist Party and the CIA. This reputation reflects the widespread sense that Shi’r’s project, which founding member Nadhir al-‘Uzma described as a “poetic politics of liberation,” reached far beyond the poems on its pages to pose a threat to the promise of an independent, modern Arab collectivity that began to be realized in the revolutionary post-colonial regimes of the fifties and sixties. Indeed, the poetic and critical work published by the Shi’r avant-garde reads as if it were written after the 1967 defeat, imbued with deep disillusionment and a fundamental distrust of the modernist intellectual machinery of ideology and scientific knowledge (al-‘ilm) with which the post-independence Arab state planned to bring about the supposed inevitabilities of unity, freedom and modernity. In hostile opposition to the “literature of commitment” that dominated the intellectual-artistic milieu of late fifties, the members of tajammu’ shi’r defended a neo-decadent stance of “poetry for poetry’s sake” from which they revolutionized Arabic verse, articulating radically new poetic forms and themes inspired by American and European modernisms. While most scholarship on Shi’r has highlighted the significance of its contribution to Arab literary aesthetics, this paper seeks to excavate its philosophical intervention in the positivist narrative of Arab progress in the fifties and sixties. My analysis of the founders’ early manifestos and definitions of “modern poetry” reveals this journal’s systematic critique of enlightened modernity, targeted specifically at the privileging of al-‘ilm as the arbiter of conscious life. I argue that this avant-garde’s conceptualization of “modern poetry” as a vision (ru’iya) for reality based on the mystical, emotive aspect of human experience constitutes an alternative and direct challenge to the post-colonial Arab state and its scientific-socialist ideological premises. By revealing the philosophical valences of dissent in Shi’r’s articulation of a modernist poetics, this paper identifies a new terrain for investigating the relation between the literary and the political as it has unfolded in Arab culture and aesthetics since the mid-twentieth century.