Drama as a literary genre was treated as an instrument of modernity, not different from other modern instruments of discourse, such as autobiography, novels, poetical free verse, reporting, and journalism and mass media. Drama played a big role in creating and maintaining what Anderson calls “the imagined community”. As the idea of nation was materializing itself through a variety of discourses, Arab theatre was deeply involved in what Anderson calls “transformation of fatality into continuity and contingency into meaning.” In this study I will focus on the dramatic verse in the Arab world (known in Arabic as al-masra? al shi’ri) as a historiographical account of modernity and tradition. I will first give a brief review of the narrative written on the early beginnings of Arab poetic drama and its eventual evolution into different dramatic genre parallel to what happened to the English Renaissance dramatic verse falling out of favor and replaced by the conversational and vernacular style. With regard to modernity I will look at modern Arab theatre’s origin as the performance of the cultural nationalist movement even if mixed with a call to preserve the cultural literary tradition through the use of the traditional metered Arabic classical poem or qasidah. The dramatic verse becomes a stage of negotiation between modernity and tradition in both form and content. I will highlight examples of the poetic drama as a tool for re-imagining the nation when faced with political, economic, or societal crisis. I will also analyze the re-writing or dramatizing of tradition by the tendency of Arab poetic drama to bring to life cultural icons and heroes in a lyrical poetical verse for the purpose of taking up societal problems. This study will also focus on the institutional role of theatre by looking at the companies who performed them emphasizing how theatre relates to historical and cultural moments of a nation. I will introduce brief samples of the following playwrights/poets, arranged chronologically: Ahmad Shawqi, Khaled al-Shawwaf, Abdulrahman al-Sharqawi, Salah Abdulsubur, Muin Bsiso, Izzedin Isma’il, Mohammad Ali al-Khafagi, and Ali Kana’an.