Selected Poems

Yannis Ritsos was one of the great poets of the twentieth century and, like Neruda, his poems are saturated with a majestic political vision blended with great lyric sensitivity. His short poems are intensely meditative and introspective while his longer poems encompass the grand sweep of history. His poetry is deeply grounded in the Greek landscape and in life of its people. He was deeply influenced by his mother's and his brother's early deaths, by the misfortune of his early life, his own uprootedness and the severe poverty which afflicted Greece. The poetry is driven by a transcendent sensuousness and muted anger. It ranges from the sublime to the ordinary, from the mythic to the modern, from the overtly political to the deeply personal. Presented with the Greek en face, the poems affirm Ritsos's reputation as one of the truly important poets in the modern literature of Greece. This bilingual edition offers a sweeping assessment of his enduring achievement.