The idea of literary commitment (ta'ahhud-i adabi) dominated much of Persian literary discourse in the 1960s and 1970s. Of the poets who both theorized on the need for poetry to be committed to the struggles of the lumpen masses and who composed verses that claimed to exemplify this commitment, Ahmad Shamlu (1925-2000) remains among the most popular and critically-acclaimed. This paper presents a close reading of Shamlu's committed poetry from the period between the 1953 Coup d'etat and the Islamic Revolution of 1979. In considering examples from Shamlu's more overtly political or ideologically charged poetry, the paper will investigate how the lyric voice imagines itself, the oppressor, and the masses for whom it professes to sing. From a historical perspective, a number of critics have shown how Shamlu expressed, though periodically interrupted by moments of revolutionary optimism, his growing disillusionment with the Iranian society in the decades before the Revolution. This paper will offer a critical reading of Shamlu's poetry to further investigate the assumptions that allow the narrative voice to characterize its society as oppressed and the assumptions that lead the poet to imagine himself as a revolutionary figure vis-a-vis the struggling masses. The theory of commitment demands that the poet configure himself and his poetry in service of the struggle. The readings presented in this paper will ultimately ask if Shamlu's poetry itself, despite the poet's ideological stances, in fact fulfills its theoretical demands. The paper is part of a larger project that revisits discourse on commitment in modern Persian and Arabic literary culture and intellectual history. In analyzing the purportedly political or social poetry of one of modern Iran's most popular "committed" poets, the paper also raises the larger question of how and why commitment became the buzzword of Persian literary criticism of the pre-Revolution period and how and why it fell from favor among critics and poets in the years that followed the Revolution. The paper will put Shamlu's poetry in dialogue with Frankfurt School aesthetics and Theodor Adorno's writings on commitment in particular to work towards a deeper historical and critical understanding of Iranian poetry in the 20th century and the discourse of commitment that dominated its production and reception for at least two decades.