When the Greek War of Independence broke out in 1821, two poets, Dionysios Solomos and Andreas Kalvos, had already begun to give expression to the re-awakening consciousness of the Greek people. Throughout the nineteenth century other poets followed these pioneers, all working in a tradition whose roots, set in the age-old demotic Greek heritage, were native and local in the best sense. The prolific master Kostis Palamas, writing his major work round the end of the century, was perhaps the most influential of these. In a way, his work marks a turning point. The strongly romantic and optimistic temper of the nineteenth century, which Palamas fully expresses, now gives place to new attitudes. On the one hand, Anghelos Sikelianos, while remaining essentially faithful to the local Greek tradition, seeks to give it new depth by incorporating into his poetry the intellectual vision of ancient religious traditions. On the other hand, the Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy introduces an element of matter-of-fact irony which, gently but effectively, confronts the reader with a human situation that, whatever else it may be, is neither romantic nor optimistic.

From the point of view of the native Greek tradition in which Solomos, Kalvos, and Palamas all wrote, the poetry of Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933), a selection from which opens this anthology, might scarcely seem to be Greek at all. Its background is very different from that of these other poets. Indeed, to begin with, it scarcely appears to have any real background of its own, and the early poems in the main do little more than reflect the fashionable literary attitudes of the last decades of the nineteenth century. Behind them one can discern the compound but somewhat etiolated shadow of such figures as Gautier, Henri Murger, Huysmans, Wilde and Pater: aesthetic, feminine, haunted by a sense of corruption, indifferent to if not scornful of nature, fastidious, devoted to art as the expression and stimulant of fine sensations, and looking upon works of art as little more than a superior and sophisticated form of aphrodisiac:

I do not want real narcissi—nor lilies
do I like, nor real roses:
the banal, the common gardens they adorn,
their flesh gives me bitterness, fatigue, and pain—
I am bored with their perishable charms.
Give me artificial flowers—the glories of metal and glass—
which neither wither nor rot, with shapes that do not age.
Flowers from the splendid gardens of another country
where Theories, and Rhythms, and Knowledge live.
Flowers I love kneaded of glass and gold
of faithful Art the faithful gifts;
with colours more beautifully tinted than those of nature,
and wrought with mother-of-pearl and enamel,
with leaves and stems ideal.
They draw their grace from wise and purest Aestheticism;
they do not sprout in the filth of earth and mud.
If they have no aroma we shall douse them with fragrance,
we shall burn before them oils of perfume.

Some of the early poems have a certain elegance and polish, but they all share, as we have noted, one central weakness: Cavafy wrote them without possessing any real personal background, without having made his own a “landscape” of figures, of visibilia, with wider terms of reference than those provided by the rootless fin de siècle aestheticism whose moods and attitudes he sought to express. It is always one of the major tasks of a poet to provide himself with such a “landscape,” and when society possesses a tradition, the images and symbols of which are common to the great majority of the people, this task is relatively simple; when there is no such tradition, it is considerably more difficult. Collective myths, collective terms of reference, lose their hold, the poet no longer shares any recognized background of imagery with the rest of society, and, whether he likes it or not, he is forced more and more into isolation. If at the same time, as is often the case, he is unable to discover for himself any purpose that transcends his individuality, and has therefore nothing left to value but what concerns the life of the senses only, his poetry is in danger of becoming the mere indulgence of private sentiment and emotion.

It was in a situation such as this that Cavafy found himself. Condemned—whether by choice or by fate is not the question—to that kind of aesthetic life which had been the interest of those figures under whose influence he wrote his first poems, how, in giving expression to this life, could he yet avoid falling back on the already debased language and imagery of an effete romanticism? Where could he find the landscape of figures, the visibilia, adequate to his purpose? As we have suggested, Cavafy had no relationship with the Greek demotic tradition on which poets like Solomos and Sikelianos, for instance, could draw with such fruitfulness; to pretend that he had would merely have meant substituting one alien background for another. In any case, the Greek demotic tradition was fundamentally heroic and patriotic, and as such was hardly likely to appeal to Cavafy, who, a colonial Greek, was little concerned with the political destiny of a new Greece; his pessimistic vision foresaw a future of conquest, decay, and death from which relief could be found only in present aesthetic pleasure, in a stoic reserve, and in the recollection of a past already long since perished.

Just how Cavafy lighted on the “landscape” through which he could speak with greater point and freedom, it is difficult to say. But it may have been that in the modern Alexandria in which he lived there were enough visible reminders of and associations with an older Alexandria to stimulate his curiosity and to suggest that recherche du temps perdu which his poetry was increasingly to become. It may have been that in the mixed races and the confusion of tongues, in the Christian churches and the pagan ruins, in the bustle of the port and in the bargaining of merchants in bazaar and market of his contemporary environment, there was enough to lead Cavafy to discover, largely through reading, a whole vanished world in which he could see, as in a mirror, the faithful reflection of that human condition which it was his desire to portray. At all events, behind the mercantilism of present-day Alexandria, Cavafy began to discern the lineaments of the great hellenistic Alexandria, the capital of the Ptolemies, centre of a flourishing kingdom and a rich terrain, peopled by Greek, Jew, Egyptians, by all the races of the Middle East. The Alexandria which Cavafy “discovered” was in fact the crown and focus of that extraordinary hellenistic world which included also such famed cities as Antioch and Jerusalem, Seleukeia and Ephesus, and numbered kingdoms like those of Syria, of Media, of Commagene, and of Macedonia itself, from which, with the conquests of Alexander the Great, all had begun. It was a curious, chequered world, knit mainly by the common Greek language. “Then he was that best of things,” Cavafy was to write, “a Hellene: mankind has no quality more precious.” And in a mock-serious poem he celebrates the expedition which gave the word Hellene the status it had in the world of which Alexandria was the centre:

And from that amazing all-Greek expedition,
the victorious, the brilliant,
the much talked of, the glorified
as no other has ever been glorified,
the incomparable, we ourselves emerged:
the great new hellenic world.
We: the Alexandrians, the Antiochians,
the Seleukeians, and the countless
other Greeks of Egypt and of Syria,
and those of Media, and of Persia, and all the rest.
With the far-reaching domination,
with the many-sided activity of prudent assimilation,
and the Common Greek Tongue
which we carried into Bactria, to the Indians.

It was in this hellenistic Alexandrian world, then, that Cavafy found the “landscape” through which he could express himself with pertinence and urbanity. Out of it he was to build his “myth” of a personal and at the same time perennial human condition, that of the tired, rapacious, over-refined man who is the generic hero of his poems, homo Europaeus, as we might call him, of our not so late humanist period. For that after all is the principal figure that emerges from behind the many masks which Cavafy gives him: the sick guest of an aesthetic city, of a Greco-Roman asylum, full of selfish desires and absurd vanities, ageing into impotence and ugliness, purified by every longing, sapped by every depravity, all sentiment and all fatigue, devoted to fate and pain as the morphinist to his drug, lonely, hollowed out, old as the ages, all nostalgia, animal and sage, all bare, with no ambitions, gnawed by the dread of death, by the relentless dance of time that sweeps all that he loves into oblivion, and finding relief only in his art where he can watch with something approaching a detached irony the spectacle of a life of pleasure, folly, misfortune, vice, and sybaritic elegance which he now can never again enjoy. The poems included here, all in Cavafy's mature voice, express different aspects of his aesthetic city and the life of which it was the centre.

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We have suggested that Cavafy, in creating his own landscape and his own tradition, remained isolated from both the contemporary Greek scene and the main currents of the Greek tradition; in contrast, Anghelos Sikelianos (1884-1951), turned to exactly those sources that Cavafy had ignored.

There are two main aspects to the poetry of Sikelianos. On the one hand, there is the lyric assertion of the natural world and of the human body as part of it. On the other hand, there is the austere vision of the seer who knows that the natural world is full of tragedy and suffering and that the true centre of man's life is elsewhere. There is a refusal to deny the senses, a suspicion of all renunciation and asceticism; and there is the lifting up, as it were, into an intensity of contemplation in which all earth-life is forgotten. There is the celebration of, and the insistence on, the holiness of life's spontaneous manifestations and energies; and there is the formal and hieratic awareness of a divine order, a conviction that man's failure to realise and to conform his life to this order leads to ultimate calamity. Both aspects belong to the total experience of the poetry, and the poems that follow have been selected with this in mind.

The first group in this selection are from among Sikelianos's earlier poems, and for the most part are representative of the first aspect of his poetry: the lyrical assertion of the natural world and its beauty. They are simple, direct, unaffected. Things are seen with a clear eye, with clear senses, with feelings undulled by custom and fixed routine. There is an immediate and reciprocal relationship between the poet and the world he describes, the lands and seas of Greece. Nature and natural events are felt as part of the poet's own subjective experience; the poet's life and the life of nature mingle:

The lightning I encountered
before it left the cloud. At the sound
of the thunder-bolt echoed
the first heart-beat of my joy;
at light awakenings,
at the sudden rustle of leaves,
at the full peal of bells,
at the night quietness of crickets,
at the first talk in the road
at morning, at the first windows
of the fishermen opening, at the rising
deep from the trees of many birds,
at dawn scents,
and at the sudden
ring of the breeze which sounds
in space, at the spring's gush
which fills
the golden pitcher of my love!

These early poems represent a phase in the poet's growth to maturity. This growth is not that of the mind alone; it is much more organic than that. It is the growth of the whole person, body and soul together, instinct and mind together, an awakening and overflowing of an integral sense of life. At the same time there is implicit even in this early poetry what one might call a “mythological” attitude towards life, a sense that there are certain more than natural forces at work in the universe, giving meaning and reality to the world perceived through the senses. There is a supernatural world as well as a natural world, there is the invisible as well as the visible. Not that these two worlds are opposed to, or radically separated from, one another. Rather, the natural world is penetrated by the forces of the supernatural world; it is in some sense an expression of these forces. Man's life is seen as incomplete and thwarted if he fails to realize this, if he persists in living as if the natural world, that which he can observe through his senses and with his mind, is the only world. His real fulfilment and purpose can only be achieved through a growing awareness of supernatural realities, through the growth of spiritual insight. Here the other aspect of Sikelianos's poetry comes into its own, that which expresses the poet's search for and perception of a divine order. But the impulse for this search, for this act of creative understanding, comes from experience of the natural world. From direct, sensual contact with living things man draws in the vital nourishment for his own life. This is the sap that feeds his growth, that stimulates new organs of perception. Intense physical delight turns into an illumination of the mind.

Sikelianos derived what we have called the “mythological” attitude towards life, implicit even in his early poetry, from the people of Greece and their immediate tradition. The lives of the people—harsh, poor, cruel as they often were—still possessed, in the time of Sikelianos's youth, a poetry, a vitality, a feeling of reverence and wonder before creation which had been largely lost in the West (and which have since been largely lost in Greece). Above all, the people of Sikelianos's youth had preserved through the centuries a wealth of song, legend, and dance in which were enshrined the perceptions and understandings, the qualities of thought and feeling, of a way of life whose roots went far back into the past.

Participation in a tradition such as that of the Greek people is of the utmost value for the poet. Even if he is unaware of the true nature of the wisdom it preserves, his attitude towards, and his sense of, life will nevertheless be permeated by it; his poetry, although unconsciously, will reflect it. This would seem to be what happened in Sikelianos's case. He had the good fortune to be born into a Greece where the traditional memory was still alive, where the traditional pattern of life still flourished, and where he found an ancient soul and an ancient aura. Instinctively he turned towards it. He mixed his life with its life, his roots with the roots which nourished the lives of the people:

And to the people I descended;
and the doors of the houses
opened so quietly
as if the doors of a tomb.
And it was as if they embraced me
returning from the grave—
thus
the fates the thread had woven—
or as if for me the dead
had come alive again:
so deep in the ground did our roots mingle,
so were our branches raised
into the heavens.

Some of Sikelianos's most beautiful poems are those in which he draws upon and expresses aspects of the lives and customs of the Greek people as he knew them: the extract from the long poem, “The Village Wedding,” in the following selection bears witness to this.

But it is one thing to write poetry which expresses—as Sikelianos's early poetry does express—a mythological attitude towards life, and another to have full and conscious understanding of the principles upon which such an attitude depends. Or, to put this another way: Sikelianos had found in the Greece into which he was born a living tradition of ideas, images, and symbols which had been preserved, even though in a confused fashion, in the memory of the people, in their legend, poetry, and dance. He had been nourished by this tradition and this memory; they had become part of him, and his responses and attitudes had to a large extent been determined by them. Since the process had in a way been an unconscious one, his task now was to make it conscious, to discover the true nature of those ideas, images, and symbols still implicit in the people's tradition. For this tradition itself was preserving in an incomplete and fragmentary way a knowledge which on a higher level had been lost. What was this knowledge and where could it be found in its more complete form? “The problem was then for me,” Sikelianos writes of this stage in his development. “By what way and with what means could I achieve essential contact with and understanding of this tradition?”

His search for this contact and understanding led him to pre-Socratic Greece. It seemed to him that in this period the true nature of that mythological attitude towards life implicit in his early poems—as in the art, beliefs and customs of the Greek people—had been consciously formulated and enshrined. Orphism, the teaching of Pythagoras, the Mysteries of Eleusis, all bore witness to this, as did the poetry of Pindar and Aeschylus. In all these, Sikelianos saw expressed what was essentially the same understanding of life, an understanding which transcended blood-groups and clans, upheld the brotherhood of man, and preserved a sense of unity embracing not only mankind but all living things. It was an understanding which Sikelianos determined to restore through his poetry to the modern world. For now it was no longer only a question of the poet giving expression to his own lyrical experience of life. It was also a question of bringing back to contemporary man some consciousness of those supernatural realities without which, according to the poet, his life would be thwarted and incomplete. All Sikelianos's later poetry springs from his awareness of these realities and his desire to awaken once more in others something of the insight and the fulfilment they brought him. Using for the most part images and symbols of the Orphic and Pythagorean tradition, though in later life more and more completing these with the images and symbols of Christianity, Sikelianos developed a poetry that is both visionary and tragic, rhapsodic and sombre, joyous and full of sorrow. But its last word is not one of despair; for beyond the desolation of time and place, of death itself, is always the reality of peace and reconciliation, the “mystical first glory” of life, whose presence, the poet believed, man could ignore only at the price of his own defeat. The second group of poems in the following selection are representative of the poetry Sikelianos wrote under the influence of this vision.

The “mythological” attitude of Sikelianos was essentially a matter of intellectual and spiritual conviction; that of George Seferis (b. 1900) is more a matter of sensibility, of intense, poetic response to the history of his race. In Seferis's poetry myth is used not so much to transmit spiritual insight as to dramatize a universal mood and state of mind; nor is myth used as a self-conscious method by which shape and order are given to the confusion and anarchy of the modern world, as it is by certain other contemporary poets. In contrast to these latter, we find in Seferis a poet who turns to myth more from a sense of personal identity with his mythology than a sense of its convenience as a means, as a method of ordering the disorder of an alien vision.

This personal sense of myth pervades the selection from his work offered here. Throughout the selection one may discern a central figure, a central persona, who “relates” the poetry. The persona might best be seen as a sea-captain, the ghost of Odysseus, “father” of the poet. He is the voice in the two long poems, Mythical Story and “Thrush,” and he serves as the poet's mask in many of the shorter lyrics. Seferis first describes him in “On a Foreign Verse” (1931); the sense of kinship between Odysseus and the poet, between the mythical hero and the mariners of Seferis's childhood in Smyrna, is apparent in the following excerpt:

It is the great Odysseus; he who had them build the wooden
horse and so the Achaeans conquered Troy.
I imagine he is coming to explain how I too may build a wooden
horse to conquer my Troy.
Because he speaks humbly and peacefully, without effort, one
might say he knows me like a father
or like certain aged mariners, who, leaning against their nets, at
a time when the wind began to rage with the fury of winter,
recited to me, in my childhood, the song of Erotocritos with
tears in their eyes …

The captain tells the poet about “the torment you feel when the sails of your ship are inflated by memory”; about “the bitterness of seeing your companions submerged by the elements, scattered; one by one”; about “how strangely your courage returns in talking to the dead, when the living who are left to you no longer suffice.” These three themes, suggested by the Odyssey myth, are among the most insistent in Seferis's poetry. They are sentiments that no doubt became particularly familiar to this poet after the loss of his childhood home in the Asia Minor disaster of 1922 and during his years away from Greece both in the diplomatic service and as an official of the exiled war-time Government; but the important thing is that they are sentiments shared by the wandering exile of all ages, and it is through the mythical background that this universal, historical extension is dramatized.

The longing of Odysseus for the return voyage to Ithaca and his memories of a distant home haunt the “I” of Mythical Story and “Thrush.” Friends and relatives lost or changed, weak companions submerged or dying, are ever on the mind of Seferis's persona. As late as “Stratis the Mariner on the Dead Sea,” written eleven years after the poem quoted above, we find:

In the Dead Sea
enemies and friends
wife and children
other relations
go and find them.

Again, in “Stratis the Mariner among the Agapanthi” (1942), our modern Odysseus bemoans the fate of his “poor, idiotic” companion Elpenor, who broke his neck in a drunken fall from the roof on Circe's palace. The persona here echoes the sea captain of “On a Foreign Verse” when he cries:

It is painful and difficult, the living are not enough for me
first because they do not speak, and then
because I have to ask the dead
in order to advance.

But the dead know “the language of flowers only,” the flowers of Homer's asphodel plain, where Odysseus had gone in order to seek guidance from the shades concerning his return home to Ithaca. Seferis's hero, trying to reach his home, finds himself exiled in Transvaal where there are no asphodels—only agapanthi (African lilies) whose “language” he does not understand. The agapanthi hold the dead speechless so that they cannot offer him the guidance that will make his homeward journey possible.

A similar nostalgia and sense of alienation, illuminated by different symbols and dramatized in a somewhat different context, inform what many critics consider to be Seferis's finest poem, “The King of Asine.” Here the mythological source is the Iliad: a single phrase identifying the King of Asine as one of the heroes who sailed with the expedition to Troy. The setting of the poem is his ruined acropolis, on a bluff near Nauplia. The phrase, now forgotten, and the king's citadel, now no more than a graveyard of stones, come to represent all that remains of the lost paradise which the nostalgia of the modern Odysseus constantly evokes and which he perennially seeks. Behind these symbols there is only the void of the past, the void of experience which has now become simply memory, of emotion which time has turned to stone—the void, finally, of the poet himself:

And the poet lingers, looking at the stones, and asks himself
does there really exist
among these ruined lines, edges, points, hollows, and curves
does there really exist
here where one meets the path of rain, wind, and ruin
does there exist the movement of the face, shape of the tenderness
of those who diminished so strangely in our lives,
those who remained the shadow of waves and thoughts boundless as the
sea
or perhaps, no, nothing is left but the weight
the nostalgia of the weight of a living being
there where we now remain unsubstantial, bending
like the branches of an awful willow-tree heaped in the permanence of
despair
while the yellow current slowly carries down rushes uprooted in the
mud
image of a form turned to marble by the decision of an eternal bitterness:
the poet a void.

This poem illustrates what is perhaps the most exciting attribute of Seferis's genius: his ability to capture the mood of a current historical moment through images that evoke the history of his race, his ability to express a contemporary state of mind in terms of the enduring qualities that define his nation: its landscape, its literature, its tangible and legendary past. The image of the past haunts the persona even when he becomes most intimate and lyrical, even when the setting and occasion that arouse him are most immediate:

And the bird that flew away last winter
with a broken wing
the shelter of life,
and the young woman who left to play
with the dogteeth of summer
and the soul which screeching sought the lower world
and the country like a large plane-leaf swept along by the torrent of
the sun
with the ancient monuments and the contemporary sorrow.

A constant source, really a symbol, of the persona's nostalgia is the figure of a woman, as the passage above suggests. This figure first appears in “Song of Love” (1930) as an apparition out of the past that comes to haunt the poem's hero with memories of an intensely sensual experience, a union, achieved at the height of fate's rising cycle and then suddenly destroyed with the downward cycle, “the cycle which brings the sorrows.” The intensity of the experience is lost in “the rocking of a foreign embrace,” but the memory of it persists as a heavy, recurrent rhythm—at the end of this poem and throughout the travels of the modern Odysseus. In “Stratis the Mariner Describes a Man,” the man described reports: “you know, I love a woman who left for the underworld,” and a bit later, “I loved a girl … I think they called her Vaso, Froso, or Bilio; so I forgot the sea.” The apparition appears again in “15” of Mythical Story; it has become even less tangible than it was in “Song of Love”: the fractured form of silence which the poet cannot touch and which returns, as quickly as it came, to the shadows of another world:

Beneath the plane-tree, near the water, amidst the laurel
sleep removed you and scattered you
around me, near me, without my being able to touch the whole of you
one as you were with your silence;
seeing your shadow grow and diminish
lose itself in the other shadows, in the other world
which released you yet held you back.

One of Seferis's latest poems, “Engomi” (1955), concludes with an apotheosis of the woman figure. She rises out of the level plain at Engomi in Cyprus “with the unripe breasts of the Virgin, a dance motionless,” to vanish in the womb of the sky like an Assumption; the poet's memory is stirred by a vision of “breasts among leaves, lips moist.” This fusion of the sensual and the spiritual, of the tangible and the intangible, characterizes the figure whenever she appears. To the modern Odysseus she is an image of love's highest ecstasy, an image of “the other world,” the lost paradise, where love cuts time in two and where the heart has not been turned to marble by insensitivity or frustration, a world which our hero longs for and seeks during his exile but which he reaches only in memory.

This brief account of Seferis's persona might seem to substantiate the poet's own view of himself expressed in an essay on “Thrush”: “I am a monotonous and obstinate man who for twenty years … have not ceased to say the same things again and again.” A more just and accurate view is that Seferis's poems, at least those offered in this selection, constitute one long work, a modern Odyssey, of a different and, it would seem to us, more significant nature than that of another modern Greek writer, Nikos Kazanzakis, examples of whose work we have not included in this anthology. In Seferis's Odyssey, unity and coherence are achieved by the repetition of related motifs and the presence, always, of the same central intelligence or sensibility. This central intelligence or sensibility is sometimes called Stratis the Mariner, but normally remains an anonymous “I.” As heir to the ancient wandering hero, he serves as an eloquent voice for all men of our age who are tormented by a sense of alienation and who long to return to a lost paradise, that is, for all men who share the perennial experience of Odysseus.

The three poets who conclude this anthology—Antoniou, Elytis, and Gatsos—belong to the generation that flowered between the mid-thirties and the mid-forties, a rich period in Greek letters, one which has not been equalled since. It was during this period that Seferis arrived at maturity with the publication of Mythical Story, Gymnopaidia, his excellent translation of Eliot, his Book of Exercises, and his two volumes called Log Book I and Log Book II; it was also the last occasion for any sort of unity or group vitality in the Greek literary world.

There was, surprisingly, considerable activity during the occupation, but the civil war and long period of recovery which followed proved to be disruptive. Good poets went on writing as individual poets will during periods of crisis—one is reminded of Cavafy's Phernazis in the poem “Darius”—but there was nothing to give the world of letters shape, no cause or movement or organ that might serve to define the established and recognize the young: if Phernazis was still alive and singing, his critics were either dead or deaf. In the late thirties, criticism was abundant, and there were several lively reviews. The most influential of these was Ta Nea Grammata, under George Katsimbalis and Andreas Karantonis; here Sikelianos published some of his finest work, here Seferis's new voice found its most responsive audience—the voice that was to dominate Greek letters for the following twenty-five years—and here some of the best new poets, including Antoniou and Elytis, received their earliest encouragement.

There is something of Seferis's nostalgia in the work of D. I. Antoniou (b. 1906). Antoniou has spent most of his life at sea as an officer in the merchant marine; the context of his poetry is that of the seaman's experience: voyages to exotic harbours, the memory of distant places, the loneliness of exile, the joy and agony of the return:

We brought you no more than stories
of distant places, memories
of precious things, of perfumes.
Do not seek their weight upon your hands;
your hands should be less human
for all we held in exile;
the experience of touch, the struggle of weight,
exotic colours
you should feel in our words only
this night of our return.

Another poem begins: “Should we turn back? / —sorrow waits for us in the past: / what you failed to exhaust on journeys, / baring your heart”; and a third: “Tonight you remembered the beginning / the evening of rain when you decided / to make experience of the nostalgia for distant places / that left us useless / for life.”

The context is familiar: the long journey and the torment of exile are motifs which Seferis exploited thoroughly and eloquently. But the nostalgia here is more subjective: the poet's voice is not masked by that of a persona, nor is the nostalgia transformed, through the agency of myth, into an historical emotion, into a sense of the eternally tragic in life, as it is in Seferis. What Antoniou gives us is a lyrical statement of a mood—a mood that grows out of immediate experience—repeated, qualified, elaborated until it becomes a metaphor, finally a representative state of mind. He conveys in his own terms (terms that remain more personal and ultimately less profound than those of Seferis) the feeling of loss in the wanderer who longs for the distant homeland—his “landscape beneath the southern sky”—and the commitment to remembrance that his wandering compels. It is, in one sense, a national state of mind, as the literature of the period amply indicates: the experience of exile is among the more typical for the contemporary Greek. This is what gives Antoniou's personal metaphor a broader dimension, a larger significance; his mood becomes to an extent generic, his statement of it a contemporary definition.

Odysseus Elytis (b. 1911) appeared (in Ta Nea Grammata) for the first time in 1935. His earliest poetry demonstrated an enthusiasm for the manner of the French Surrealists as profound as the enthusiasm for the technique of the French post-Symbolists which Seferis had revealed in his first poems at the beginning of the decade. What Elytis offered in Ta Nea Grammata and his volume Orientations (1940) was a surrealism which had a highly personal tone and a specific local habitation; the tone was lyrical, humorous, fanciful—everything that is young; the habitation was the landscape and climate of Greece, particularly the landscape of the Aegean islands. The quality of his lyricism and the surrealist influence are seen characteristically in “The Mad Pomegranate Tree,” a lovely poem, full of song and laughter and sunlight, a celebration of the lyric spirit itself:

In these all-white courtyards where the south wind blows
Whistling through vaulted arcades, tell me, is it the mad pomegrante
tree
That leaps in the light, scattering its fruitful laughter
With windy wilfulness and whispering, tell me, is it the mad
pomegranate tree
That quivers with foliage newly born at dawn
Raising high its colours in a shiver of triumph?
In petticoats of April first and cicadas of the feast of mid-August
Tell me, that which plays, that which rages, that which can entrice
Shaking out of the threats their evil black darkness
Spilling in the sun's embrace intoxicating birds
Tell me, that which opens its wings on the breast of things
On the breast of our deepest dreams, is that the mad pomegrante

The central image here—the pomegranate tree as a playful sprite who occasions all that is hopeful and gay, that is, as the embodiment of a mood—typifies what the poet himself has called the “personal mythology” of his verse: “Repeated metamorphoses—a girl that becomes fruit, a morning disposition that becomes a tree, an idea that becomes incarnate in a human form—create a personal mythology which, without divorcing itself from feeling, finds its correlation in the world of the poet's metaphysical experience.” The mystery of change, the transformation of the inanimate into the human and the human into something stranger, is hardly a new theme in poetry; what surrealism did for Elytis was to give him a means of exploiting this ancient theme in terms of his contemporary landscape and his personal sensibility, a sensibility thoroughly responsive to the beauty of Greece.

The evocation of landscape and climate through surrealist images is everywhere apparent in Elytis's early verse. In this poem we have “the saffron ruffle of day / Richly embroidered with scattered songs” and the tree “Fluttering a handkerchief of leaves of cool flame, / A sea near birth with a thousand ships and more,” or “adorn[ing] itself in jealousy with seven kinds of feathers, / Girding the eternal sun with a thousand blinding prisms.” The sea and the sun are so consistently celebrated as to suggest a kind of pagan mysticism, a pantheism, a worship of the gods of water and light. The poet himself has said that his vision is “essentially that of the marine world of the Aegean, with a certain mystical extension that has its centre in the midday and the light.” In his poems, this vision is never, of course, reduced to a theology or even a statement of faith; it is always represented by specific images or observed settings, most palpably in the volume with the significant title of The First Sun (1943), from which the large part of our selection comes.

The poems in this volume offer a landscape which is both typical and personal; it is the landscape of Greece highlighted by the poet's almost religious adoration:

Drinking the sun of Corinth
Reading the marble ruins
Striding across vineyards and seas
Sighting along the harpoon
A votive fish that slips away
I found the leaves that the psalm of the sun memorizes
The living land that desire opens joyously.
I drink water, cut fruit,
Thrust my hand into the wind's foliage
The lemon trees irrigate the pollen of summer
The green birds tear my dreams
I leave with a glance
A wide glance in which the world is recreated
Beautiful from the beginning to the dimensions of the heart!

The familiar ruins, the vineyards, the lemon trees, the sea and the sun, are all here, and so is the voice of the poet offering up a hymn in worship of what he sees. The climate too is immediately recognizable, yet even when the poet describes it in his simplest style, his description seems an act of praise:

A long time has passed since the last rain was heard
Above the ants and lizards
Now the sun burns endlessly
The fruit paints its mouth
The pores in the earth open slowly
And beside the water that drips in syllables
A huge plant gazes into the eye of the sun.

In another passage, an abrupt change in rhythm, a repeated phrase, suddenly turns the description of a familiar setting into a cry of ecstasy:

The images of the Resurrection
On walls that the pine-trees scratched with their fingers
This whitewash that carries the noonday on its back
And the cicadas, the cicadas in the ears of the trees.

The First Sun appeared during the occupation and for some time now has been out of print. Elytis published one more poem at the conclusion of the war, a long and substantial elegy on a hero of the Albanian campaign, then remained silent for thirteen years, that is, until the publication in 1958 of excerpts from a work called “Worthy is it” (the complete text appeared in a volume with that title published in 1959), and in 1960 of a short volume entitled Six and One Regrets for the Sky, from which we have chosen “The Autopsy” and “Beauty and the Illiterate.” This long silence, now fortunately broken, was symptomatic of the general lethargy in Greek letters following the occupation. Another extremely talented contemporary, Nikos Gatsos (b. 1912) suffered the same fate, without any reprieve so far. Along with Seferis and Elytis, Gatsos belonged to the group that made Ta Nea Grammata prosper in the late thirties. He published a single volume of verse in 1943, Amorgos, then became silent (except for a number of translations, including a highly praised version of Lorca's Blood Wedding). But his single volume of verse was a startling contribution to contemporary Greek poetry: it was more impressive in quality than any first volume of poems since Seferis's Turning Point, published twelve years earlier. Especially exciting was the toughness of the poet's sensibility and the vitality of his diction, which was a fusion of the traditional and the colloquial. Lines such as the following (only a vague approximation in translation) offered not only a new voice but a new possibility for extending the permissible language of poetry:

In the griever's courtyard no sun rises
Only worms appear to mock the stars
Only horses sprout upon the ant hills
And bats eat birds and cast off sperm.
In the griever's courtyard night never sets
Only the foliage vomits forth a river of tears
When the devil passes by to mount the dogs
And the crows swim in a well of blood.
In the griever's courtyard the eye has gone dry
The brain has frozen and the heart turned to stone
Frog-flesh hangs from the spider's teeth
Hungry locusts scream at the vampire's feet.

This violence of language is ultimately tempered by a lyricism reminiscent of Elytis: “It was the face of May, the moon's whiteness / A step light as a tremor on the meadow / A kiss of the foam-trimmed sea.” And the fanciful image, engendered once again by French surrealism, is offered occasionally as a counterpoint to harsher matter: we find, for example, “the snow-covered meadows of the moon,” and “the kerchief of some evening” and “the ready embrace of the wounded sea.” In fact, the defining characteristic of this verse—the characteristic that establishes its originality—is an ever-present tension between the violent and the lyrical, the harsh and the tender, the crude and the beautiful: in specific images, in the juxtaposition of lines, in the structure of whole poems. The passage quoted above, for example, gives us worms mocking stars, bats eating birds, foliage vomiting forth tears, a heart turned to stone; and all of this is juxtaposed with a quiet ending. The second poem in this selection, “They Say the Mountains Tremble,” offers a similar series of oppositions: two small cyclamens kissing in the mud, and eagle building its nest “within your eyes,” a penguin's tear falling in the frozen wilderness, the knife of some sorrow penetrating the cheek of hope, brigands singing in aromatic groves. The opening of the poem is typically violent:

They say the mountains tremble and the fir-trees rage
When night gnaws the tile-pins to let in the kallikantzari
When hell gulps down the torrents' foaming toil
Or when the hair of the pepper tree becomes the north-wind's plaything

In contrast, the ending is again quiet, almost reverential (a mood reinforced by the allusion to the Eucharist):

Enough to find a sharp sickle and a plough in a joyful hand
Enough if a little wheat flowers for the feasts,
A little wine for remembrance, a little water for the dust.

The tension between contraries carries over into the poet's attitude towards experience. In this poem it is that between despair and hope, cynicism and expectation (especially plausible tensions when one remembers that the poem was written during the Occupation):

But here on this damp bank there is one way only
One deceptive way and you must take it
You must plunge into blood before time forestalls you,
Cross over opposite to find your companions again
Flowers birds deer
To find another sea, another tenderness,
To take Achilles' horses by the reins
Instead of sitting dumb scolding the river
Stoning the river like the mother of Kitso
Because you too will be lost and your beauty will have aged.

The speaker's bravado hides a bitterness, a bitterness against decay and dying youth (the earlier allusion to Heraclitus is to the point). His hope of crossing to “another sea, another tenderness” is undercut by this bitterness: the way over is deceptive, and the need to take it is made imperative by the certainty of old age and death. The attitude here recalls the longing for a lost paradise in Seferis's poetry—the references to companions, to another sea, to the classical figure reinforce this—but in Gatsos the tone is more stark, and the longing is reduced to its barest elements, the little most necessary to sustain body and soul: wheat, wine, and water.

.....

These, then, are the six poets who have spoken most forcefully in contemporary Greek verse. Since each has his individuality and his specific interest, any generalization that includes all of them, that attempts to define the group as a whole, must be regarded with some suspicion. It can be safely said, however, that the one thing which most clearly distinguishes modern Greek poetry from that of other Western countries and which gives the contemporary movement a certain unity is the ardent consciousness that these poets share of being Greek; each projects his personal vision in terms of what that word most clearly designates for him: a mythology, a history, a landscape, a state of mind—sometimes all four of these. There is no contemporary verse more intensely local in the broadest meaning of the term, no verse that gives a more precise sense of a nation's present experience. There is also no verse more conscious of its heritage. The expression of the personal in terms of the historical, the translation of the subjective into the more objective, always characteristic of these poets, is very much in keeping with the method and spirit of their ancient Greek and Byzantine ancestors. Both in its individual representatives and as a whole the poetry of modern Greece is thus the latest expression of a long and noble tradition, a tradition in which it is sufficiently accomplished to sing without embarrassment and without presumption.