Plaka: Literature: Poetry

Generalization about poetry is largely useless, but I admire Greek poetry because it often has a dynamism; it is not often about still life or very passive. Greek poetry is often aware of the political, speaks of the agony of the human situation of facing death but still has infinite dreams and can be unashamedly passionate.

Some Resources

Katerina Sarri's site Many links to poetry sites covering ancient and modern. (Up 8/19/2022; posted 1/14/05)

Greek Poetry Now (Up 8/19/2022; posted 2/8/20)

A page about Stavros Melissinos, the poet sandlemaker of Athens. (Up 2/8/20; posted 1/14/00) ".. only give me the smile of Pain ..."

Modern Greek Poetry (Up 11/6/22)

This book has an extensive collection of modern Greek poetry.

Peter Bien, Peter Constantine, Edmund Keeley, Karen Van Dyck, eds.
A Century of Greek Poetry 1900-2000 Bilingual Edition

Early Modern Greek Poets

There are certainly noted poets from the beginning of the independent Greek nation. I would not try to name the most famous, but two names that repeatedly come up are:

Dionysios Solomos (1798 - 1857)

Kostis Palamas (1859 - 1943)

I will expand on them at a later date.

Four Famous 20th Century Greek Poets

Constantine P. Cavafy (1863 - 1933)
Author of "Ithaka" and "Waiting for the Barbarians."

Long-time resident of Alexandria, Egypt.

George Seferis (1900-1971)

Nobel laureate, 1963.

Yiannis Ritsos(1909-1990)

Odysseus Elytis (1911-1996)

Nobel laureate, 1979.

Contemporary Greek Poets

I have no clue who is noted or most talked about among contemporary Greek poets, but here is one poet I admire.

Beside my other books, invisible,
existent nontheless, is a volume of silence.
Contained in it are all the things
I hid from view and all that failed
to make the long journey within
me and emerge into the light.

This book is focused on the internet/blog generation of poets and those circulated in 'minor' journals. Many poets, with introduction to their life and work.

Both this book and the collection described in the right-hand column contain a fair number of female poets.