On 2 February 1977,[15] Hussein died in a fire at his New York apartment.[2][3] On 8 February,[8] he was buried in Musmus, where his tomb has since served as a Palestinian nationalist symbol.[3] Many of Hussein's works were published in a volume edited by Kamel Ballouta called The World of Rashid Hussein: A Palestinian Poet in Exile (Detroit, 1979).[8] In Shefa-'Amr in 1980, a commemorative volume of Hussein's poems and other literary works was published, including Qasa'id Filastiniyya.[3] Another Arabic collection of his poems, Palestinian Poems, was published in 1982.[8] In a 1986 poem, Mahmoud Darwish, who had encountered Hussein in Cairo, commemorated his death as a sudden loss of a charismatic figure who could invigorate the Palestinian people,[16] writing: