The concept of a national poet with the power to shape a national movement and define a country’s collective spirit seems to belong to a different century. But for Palestinians, who have yet to see their dreams of an independent state realised, it was embodied by Mahmoud Darwish.

None of them doubted that the poet, who died in the US last Saturday after a major heart operation, was Palestine’s national poet. But unlike the dead literary heroes of Europe he was accessible in every sense of the word.

Poetry may have become a minority art form in much of the rest of the world, but in the Palestinian territories Mr Darwish’s poems were read, taught, learnt and sung everywhere. His work was refined, rich and complex – but it was always part of the Palestinian cultural mainstream.

Mr Darwish’s public readings – the latest took place in the West Bank town of Ramallah only last month – were big events. His popularity was enhanced by the fact that he never shied away from touching upon the painful realities of present day Palestinian society. Last year, he penned a widely-quoted work that dealt with the internecine fighting between Hamas and Fatah, the two biggest Palestinian parties. Palestinians would also follow with fascination, and sometimes with scepticism, his political musings, not least his trenchant criticism of the Oslo peace process.

Mr Darwish was born in 1941, seven years before the creation of Israel, in the village of al-Birweh near the coastal city of Acre. He and his family fled to Lebanon in 1948, forming part of the huge stream of Palestinian refugees who were either expelled by advancing Israeli troops or left in the hope of returning after the war.

He published his first volume of poetry in 1960, and became an early member of Yassir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation. Until his death, he managed to straddle the worlds of politics and poetry with determination, if not always with ease.

On several memorable occasions, these two worlds fused, for example when he sat down to write Mr Arafat’s 1974 speech in front of the United Nations general assembly. It included the famous line: ”Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.” Mr Darwish also wrote the Palestinian declaration of independence in 1988.

Another seminal document – the Oslo peace accords agreed by Mr Arafat and the Israeli government in 1993 – led to a rupture between Mr Darwish and the PLO, and caused the poet to resign from the group’s executive committee.

Like several Palestinian intellectuals, he was deeply opposed to the agreement, arguing that it did not offer Palestinians a clear path towards statehood and did not commit Israel firmly enough to ending the occupation. His pessimism, much to his own regret, was proven right.

Though he was loved by Palestinian readers above all because he found the words to describe their suffering and quest for statehood, Mr Darwish was far more than a political poet. Indeed, the themes to which he returned again and again – exile, longing, alienation – resonated with readers all over the world. Mr Darwish insisted in one interview that ”exile is more than a geographical concept”, stressing that his themes were far from unique to the Palestinian people.

For Palestinians, who are likely to turn out in their thousands when he is laid to rest at a state funeral in Ramallah on Wednesday, the death of Mr Darwish is a severe blow. After Edward Said, the famous literary critic and author who died five years ago, they have now lost their second intellectual of world repute.

Mr Darwish himself was acutely aware of the power that words and poems and their writers hold in a nation that remains stateless and politically impotent. As he wrote in his 1986 poem Fewer Roses: “We travel like everyone else, but we return to nothing…Ours is a country of words: Talk, Talk. Let me see an end to this journey.”