Death claimed the Lebanese poet Muhammad Ali Shams al-Din at dawn today, September 11, 2022. At the age of 80 after a health relapse during which he was hospitalized for days. His daughter, the poet Rabab, mourned him on her Facebook page and said: With more satisfaction and submission to ,d's decree and destiny, we announce the death of Lebanon's poet and man of letters, our beloved Dr. Muhammad Ali Shams al-Din. The great deceased will be laid to rest at 4:00 pm today, Sunday, September 11, 2022, in the cemetery of the town of Arabsalim. (To ,d we belong and to Him we shall return). She mourned him with the following poem: You did not teach me how to shroud a poem when we have washed it with the tears of our eyes, you did not teach me how to bury poetry and you did not tell me that poetry has graves. You dug up all the dust of Beirut, my father, and Beirut did not accommodate you, O poet, so where shall I lodge your holy body and how shall the pulpits mourn you in death?

Muhammad Ali Shams al-Din was born in 1942 in the village of Beit Yahoun in the Bint Jbeil district in southern Lebanon. He grew up in the town of Arabsalim near Nabatiyeh. He holds a state doctorate in history and also holds a license in law.

Shams al-Din worked as director of inspection and control at the National Social Security Fund in Lebanon. He held the position of Chief Inspector in the Social Security and was a first-class employee.

His poetic talent blossomed early, and he is considered one of the leading poets of modernization in the Arab world since 1973 until now. He began his poetic life with a group of collections that received critical monitoring, including: Poems Smuggled to My Beloved Asia, The Violet Thorn, and then after that: Those Descending from the Wind and other prominent poetic works.

He participated in many poetry festivals in Arab countries and most of his poetry interacts with the symbols of Arab and Islamic history. In 2011, he won the Al Owais Poetry Prize. His poems have been translated into more than one language, including Spanish, French and English. Many Arab and Western critics have written about his poems, including the Spanish orientalist Pedro Montabes, who said: (It seems to me that Muhammad Ali Shams al-Din is the most important and most promising name in the last what was written of modern Lebanese poetry, in this poet there is something of a risk, intense and difficult. Something that calls for the absolute abstract, the unified essence, attached to poetry in the work of Shams al-Din, and few are the poets who triumph over the adventure of imagination, and , beyond the frame of what is general and ordinary, and these know that their adventure is a major risk, but they advance in its path).

His poetry received wide popularity in Lebanon and the Arab countries, and he published a number of collections including: I Call You My King and My Beloved, Birds to the Bitter Sun, Is It Not Time for the Dance to End, Admiral of the Birds, Plowing in the Wells of Dice Houses, High Kingdoms, Stony Winds, The Book of Circumambulation, Circles of Solitude, Despair of the Rose Strangers in Their Place, Clouds That are in the Suburbs, Shiraziya Complete Works (two parts).