He was born in the town of Salamiyah, Hama Governorate, in Syria to an Isma’ili family.[citation needed] He was married to the poet Saniya Salih.
Muhammad Maghout has been credited as the father of Arabic free verse poetry, liberating Arabic poems from the traditional form and revolutionizing the structure of the poem. While in prison in the 1950s, he wrote his first poems on cigarette papers as a personal memoir of his prison experience, later discovered to be revolutionary poetry. Without formal education, his future work tapped into his vivid imagination, innate mastery of words, and intuition. He wrote for theater, TV, and cinema. Maghout’s work combined satire with descriptions of social misery and malaise, and what he viewed as an ethical decline among rulers in the region. Some of his themes included the problems of injustice and totalitarian governments. The struggle of the marginalized was at the heart of all his work.