Faiz has been acknowledged as the greatest Urdu poet after Iqbal. Here is a vignette of this great romantic.

One of the foremost poets South Asia, Faiz Ahmed Faiz was born on February 13th, 1911, in Sialkot, Pakistan. He joined the Army as Captain in 1942 and worked in the department of Public Relations in Delhi. After partition of India, and the formation of Pakistan, he resigned as a Lieutenant Colonel from the Army in 1947 and returned to Lahore, where, in 1959 appointed as Secretary, Pakistan Arts Council and worked in that capacity till 1962.

Faiz has been acknowledged as the greatest Urdu poet after Iqbal. He was a keen student of various traditions of classical poetry in Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi, Arabic, Persian, and English among others and had realized at an early age that it was the content and not the form which was basic in the art of poetry, that originality had little to do with formal experimentation and was primarily a matter of a profound understanding of human existence in its totality and wholeness.

Iqbal had sung poems of glory to the fact of revolution and given out a clarion call to the people to rise up against the master-classes and tyrants. Faiz, having joined the people in their rebellion, and having adopted the collective cause as a poet of the revolution, made the transformation of the individual human being and his passage through the infinite variety of situations and moods in this process, the subject of his poetry.

And yet love is the leitmotif of his poetry. Faiz Ahmad Faiz is the voice of the conscience of the suffering humanity of our times. A voice which is a song as well as a challenge, which has a burning faith and cries out against the agony of its era, a constant endeavor and the thunder of the revolution, as well as the sweet recital of love and beauty. Faiz is one of the great lyricists who seems, from one point of view, to have sung of nothing with greater passion than love.
Faiz takes Ghalib's plea for a deeply philosophical coordination of the poetic profession as his premise to refute the arguments of the aesthetes of his time for whom poetry was merely peripheral activity. But he goes further and comments that Ghalib's definition of creative vision is incomplete, because the poet is not only required to see the ocean in the drop, but also has to show it to others.

For writing poetry that always antagonizes the ruling elite and challenges colonial and feudal values, Faiz had to go to jail repeatedly during both colonial and postcolonial times in Pakistan.
This poem of his (translated into English) seems relevant to us even today, wherever we live. The original is also accessible at http://www.mit.edu/people/anajam/Faiz2.html

Speak

Speak, your lips are free.
Speak, it is your own tongue.
Speak, it is your own body.
Speak, your life is still yours.

See how in the blacksmith's shop
The flame burns wild, the iron glows red;
The locks open their jaws,
And every chain begins to break.

Speak, this brief hour is long enough
Before the death of body and tongue:
Speak, 'cause the truth is not dead yet,
Speak, speak, whatever you must speak.

Stanza

If they snatch my ink and pen,
I should not complain,
For I have dipped my fingers
In the blood of my heart.
I should not complain
Even if they seal my tongue,
For every ring of my chain
Is a tongue ready to speak.