In the late nineteenth century, with the rise of Al Nahda, the Arab cultural renaissance movement, the concept of the committed artist came to take center stage in the Arab world. Like French Romantics who believed themselves to be spiritual guides for the “masses,” the role of the artist at the turn of the twentieth century in Egypt was to surmount the frontier between art and politics and serve a socio-political purpose. However, as Ahmad Fouad Negm, writing in the 1970s, opens a poem with the phrase, “I am the people”, one could ask whether this limit between life and art was in fact being entirely effaced. The poet functionally stops guiding the people to become them, as the separation between the two is superfluous: the choice to elide the political is as much of a position as commitment, and expression—whether supposedly detached or committed—is always political. Negm himself was an Egyptian revolutionary leftist poet whose songs have been sung at demonstrations, particularly at the 1971-1972 student protests and the 1977 insurgency. His work was instrumental in transforming the relationship between poet and people from a state of communication through the interface of art to one of fusion between them, and as such his poetry marked a transitory moment in committed literature. This oft-ignored era of Egyptian poetry is now academically relevant as Negm’s poems have been appropriated by Egyptian revolutionary youth and sung in Tahrir Square since early 2011. This paper will, therefore, examine traits that are characteristic of his poetry, such as the use of colloquial Arabic, a working-class-oriented vocabulary that is nonetheless starkly distinguishable from the regime’s populist rhetoric, and the blending of the lyrical and epic registers. It aims to elucidate the way these elements work together in Negm’s poem to challenge the very supposition of a limit between poetry and politics. It will also tie this shift in paradigm to possible non-Egyptian influences, in particular Sartre, whose Qu’est-ce que la littérature was translated into Arabic as early as 1960.