Creator of the new poetic form, the 777 poem, M. Ray Allen made his debut as a poet at the opening ceremony of The Douglass House Center in Long Beach, California in 1968, where Budd Schulberg, an Academy Award-winning screenwriter, served as the keynote speaker. Allen was inducted as the 80th member of the Morehead State University Alumni Hall of Fame in 1991, for his literary achievements, career as an educator, and community service work with Appalfolks of America Association, a nonprofit corporation that he founded in 1985, to promote the literary and performing arts.

Allen is featured as a post-World War II poet in Encyclopedia of Appalachia, a 2006 publication by the University of Tennessee Press, as follows: "M. Ray Allen, a poet and Appalachian activist from Clifton Forge, Virginia, is a native of Martin, Kentucky, whose writing and teaching career led him to help Appalachian youth through literacy and the performing arts."

In conclusion, editors, Jean Haskell and Rudy Abramson, rendered, "Allen's poems are widely published in literary arts magazines across the United States and in four book-length volumes."

Having won more than 40 poetry awards over the years, Allen's 777 Poems, his fifth book of poems, includes a "Study Guide" and an "Answer Section," both based on the King James Version (KJV).