Monday, February 16, 2009

Greece's Modern Heavyweights















CP Cavafy, Alexandria c.1890




















George Seferis, London c.1920














Odysseus Elytis (out on the Aegean?)













Yiannis Ritsos
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2 comments:

  1. bakkenpoetFebruary 16, 2009 at 11:42 PM

    Hi,

    I might offer a friendly corrective to the title of this post: these four poets represent monuments of Greek poetry in the first half of the century (though both Seferis and Ritsos lived well beyond that). The monuments of the latter half of the century (those who came right at the beginning of the Greek Civil War, through the junta, and into what followed) need to be mapped as well: Titos Patrikios, Manolis Anagnostakis, Kiki Dimoula, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, Tassos Denegris, Miltos Sachtouris, etc. These poets would represent a generation analogous to the one in our country that includes W.S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich, Richard Wilbur, Allen Ginsberg and Theodore Roethke (though I'm not drawing any specific parallels, of course). Needless to say, these are major figures. Those poets featured in the anthology you are reading come AFTER this generation, which means most American readers end up skipping a crucial arc in the broader trajectory of Greek poetry.

    Christopher Bakken

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  2. bakkenpoetFebruary 16, 2009 at 11:45 PM

    Oh, and Elytis out-lived them all...thereby over-shadowing some of the important work being done by his younger contemporaries.

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