'Aqqad and Mazini proved much more successful than their greater contemporary Mutran in altering the current literary taste. They did not, however, accomplish this change by their own poetry so much as by their criticism. Both ‘Aqqad and Mazini were powerful polemic writers, brilliant essayists who wrote much in the leading newspapers of the day, and were avidly read especially by the younger generation. Having to a large extent succeeded in dethroning Shauqi and Hafiz, or at least in dislodging them from the seats of eminence, they made it possible for the public to be at least prepared to listen to different voices, if not actually to welcome these voices. What they were doing in Egypt was being done effectively in the Lebanon and in America by even more radical innovators, extremists like Amin al-Rihani, Jibrān Khalīl Jibrān and Mikha'il Nu'aima, whose writings were by no means confined to these regions, but found their way to Egypt almost immediately.

But the new poetic voices in Egypt were a development not so much of the poetry of ‘Aqqad or Mazini or even of Shukri, as of the great Syro-Egyptian poet Mutran. Dr Aḥmad Zakī Abū Shādī began as a disciple of Mutran, who was a friend of his father's, and he acknowledged his debt to his master on many occasions. At the conclusion of the second edition of his volume of verse. The Dewdrops of Dawn (1910), Abu Shadi wrote an essay entitled ‘Mutran's influence on my verse’, and Mutran, in turn, wrote an introduction to Abu Shadi's volume Spring Phantoms (1933).