From a Heideggerian philosophical perspective, the world is not merely a collection of objects or a network of conventional relations; rather, at a deeper level, it is essentially and continuously bound to the question of Being (existence). The world, in itself, constitutes a mode of Being, and the true task of philosophy lies in being ontological—an inquiry into the Being of this world. From another angle, when we turn to contemporary literature and poetry, we find that one of the defining features of present-day poetry is its engagement with the world, its manifestations and elements, as well as the dominant relations governing it, from this very perspective.

In contemporary Arabic literature, the poetry of Adonis undoubtedly represents one of the most prominent embodiments of this approach. Adonis is a poet-philosopher—or a philosopher-poet—who harnesses the latent energy of language to articulate an epistemological vision of Being, to the extent that one may argue that the central poetic concern in his work is the question of existence itself.

This article focuses on Martin Heidegger’s concept of the “worldhood of the world” and examines selected poems from Adonis’s recent poetic collection Adoniada to offer a reading that highlights this ontological presence. The study adopts a descriptive-analytical methodology, and the findings indicate that Adonis, at times, operates in harmony with Heidegger’s ontological insights by creating the text within the space of language, while at other times, as a creative poet, he advances a more progressive—and even divergent—vision in addressing certain thematic axes. He thus exploits the possibilities of poetry, which, by its very nature as a mode of Being in its own right, maintains a broader and more fundamental relationship with ontological inquiry.