He was born in the town of Salamiyah of Hama Governorate in Syria to an Isma'ili family.[citation needed] He was married to the poet Saniya Salih.

Muhammad Maghout was credited as the father of the Arabic free verse poetry, liberating the Arabic poems from the traditional form and revolutionizing the structure of the poem. He penned his first poems on cigarette papers while in prison in the 1950s, he wrote it as his personal memoir of the prison experience later to be discovered as revolutionary poetry.