Of those poets who established the “free verse” movement (al-shi'r al-hurr) during the mid-twentieth century in Iraq, Shadhil Taqah (1929-1974) has remained relatively unknown among scholars of modern Arabic poetry. While Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Nazik al-Mala'ikah, and Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati, along with several other poets educated at the Baghdad Teacher’s College—where Taqah also attended—have gotten some attention within Western academia, Taqah’s contributions to free verse poetry have gone almost totally unaddressed. This might be because his first collection of poetry, al-Masa' al-akhir (The Last Night) appeared in 1950, a few years after Sayyab and Mala'ikah’s initial free verse forays. But Bayati’s breakthrough free verse collection Abariq Muhashshamah did not come out until 1954, and several studies have been devoted to his work. So why haven’t scholars been willing to consider Taqah’s poetry as an integral part of the free verse movement? This paper situates Taqah’s work in relation to the development of free verse in Iraq during the 1950s and 1960s and highlights the profound connections in forms and themes between his work and that of the better-known Iraqi modernist poets. In addition to The Last Night, I also address in the paper 1963’s Thumma mata al-layl (And Then the Night Died) and 1969’s al-A'war al-dajjal wa-l-ghuraba' (The One-Eyed Antichrist and the Strangers) to show how Taqah engaged with foot-based taf'ilah poetry in much the same way as the other Iraqi modernists. I pay particular attention to Taqah’s penchant for integrating local content into his poems from his native Mosul and the ancient Mesopotamian capital of Nineveh, now situated right beside the modern city. For instance, And Then the Night Died opens with “Cain in Damlamajah,” a spring outside Mosul probably dating to the Hellenistic period. However, like his Iraqi compatriots, Taqah also deals directly with decolonial politics in his poetry, as he does in the next poems in the collection, “Dawn in Oran” and “Algeria, Dawn, and the Martyr,” both about the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). Furthermore, Taqah served as the Iraqi Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1969 to 1970, an experience that puts him alongside several other Arab poets who spent time in Russia during the height of the Cold War. In my conclusion, therefore, I suggest some future directions in which studying Taqah’s life and work might take us in the hopes of writing a chapter missing from the history of Iraqi modernism.