Al-Bayyati is regarded today as one of the leading Arab poets from 1950s, especially known for his commitment to Pan-Arab unity through revolutionary poems addressed to ’common folk’ of all Arab-speaking countries. Being raised in the focal point of the religious and social milieu of downtown Baghdad, near the shrine of the 12th century Sufi Abdel Qadir al-Jilani, explains in part his cosmopolitan scope of history from which he drew upon in his poetry. So too being exiled away from the homeland (see biography section) influenced his writing. More often than not a local café in an airport, or a particular section of town he liked became his office and place of residence. It is no surprise then that the first poem to appear in Modern Iraqi Poetry is To Naguib Mahfouz, author of Midaq Alley about café life. Al-Bayyati could be addressing Mahfouz, calling him:

Sultan of Light Years at Café Riche
Around the treasures of his world

In Midaq Alley the café is the heartbeat of the small Egyptian alleyway. Juxtaposed with this view of café life however, Al-Bayyati changes epochs with a scriptural reference:

Waiting for the spirit to return,
And the warmth of the Song of Songs

Al-Bayyati sees his contemporary life of struggle against the modern sultan in the same fashion as epic tales of resistance from the oldest texts popularly available.

Another aspect of Al-Bayyati’s poetry related to his exiled status were his many poems addressed to contemporary and historical social icons ranging from Aish’a the beloved of the Persian poet Omar Khayyam to Mao Zedong, Che Geuvara, Hemmingway, T.S. Elliot. Though he spent significant potions of his life in both the First and Second world in the height of the cold war, this does not mean he was necessarily conciliatory to all things western. In "T.S. Elliot" he laments:

No wandering poets no lovers no martyrs no drop of water

One can read this as disregarding the boring and alien life of exile as he speaks to fellow Arabs. In fact by using western influences in his writing Al-Bayyati reinforces Pan-Arab feelings of otherness by describing a land

where the rags are
where the poets are
the living martyrs,

Al-Bayyati’s poetry experimented with different styles, breaking away from the classical forms to free verse. As with so many of his contemporaries, al-Bayyati is credited with leading the harakat al-shi al har (the free verse movement). In part this shift can be read as yet another reflection of his commitment to the masses. Al-Bayyati wrote with a meticulous economy of words in simple language, which came nearer to common speech, and was more accessible than more traditional poetics. As he said about the art of writing “one is not fooling around or simply inventing things. Rather one is capturing things. Capturing the atoms that make up our universe. Capturing and crystallizing thoughts, molding them into literary form.”

Along with his political and social commentary there is a certain mystical quality. Through his Sufi heritage, he found a range of sensuousness exposing a mixture of pleasure and pain intertwined inseparably together. For example Three Ruba’yat and Nine Ruba’yat are apt for comparison given their titles. In the first poem, Al-Bayyati dreams of

My beloved, naked, dancing in a glass of wine.
I wanted to drink it, but I drowned in the glass and the darkness
I was a bard to His Majesty, the Sultan…
I took my beloved, he lips flowing with wine;
I burst forth in song;
I slayed the majesty of the sultan

Through bleeding out his heart to his people, Al-Bayyati succeeds in dethroning the sultan all the way to the diminutive lower case. The latter poem however is an embittered remembrance of a world lost to the author, as he revolves in orbit around the homeland. He describes the necessarily petty and absurd life he lives away from all that defines him, like “blowing ash” waiting for salvation.

So too for Al-Bayyati, the woman he so often describes takes on more than a strictly anatomical nature. She becomes in his allusions an abstract symbol of the ideal, incorporating his younger romantic visions into the greater context of world literature itself. As he says about the dominant role of women in his work “Some art critics believe that color is the most essential aspect of paintings. A painting, they say, is color. I say the poem is a woman."