Welcome to Greek poetry - February 2004

January 18, 2006 Most poetry readers have some awareness of Ancient Greece as the cultural wellspring of the Western world, or some appreciation of contemporary Greece as an enchantment of sun-washed shores and ruins, but the more-than-two-thousand-year interim between these two worlds often is, to them, a blank or blurred page of history. If Homer, Sappho and Euripides live on as household names, Seferis and Elytis, both Nobel laureates, are still little known to the wider public. With the exception of Cavafy (and Kazantzakis in prose) no other major Greek modern writer has been able to attract more than a limited readership. Yet modern Greek poetry is neither marginal nor minor. It is the constituent part, and a very important one, of the literature of modern Europe.

In our February issue, we introduce to you the poetry of {id="2461" title="Nikos Karouzos"} and {id="2465" title="Yiannis Ritsos"}.

We hope that you will continue to visit this site, which will gradually chart the growth and flowering of Greek poetry in recent decades, a poetry of great originality, force and beauty that engages the reader on the deepest level.