Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: Homer and the modern Greek poets
- PART ONE HOMER IN THE NEW GREECE: THE SPIRIT AND THE LETTER
- 1 Kalvos and Solomos
- 2 Archaism and kleftism
- 3 Palamas
- PART TWO SIKELIANOS
- PART THREE CAVAFY
- PART FOUR SEFERIS
- Reflections
- Further reading
- References
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: Homer and the modern Greek poets
- PART ONE HOMER IN THE NEW GREECE: THE SPIRIT AND THE LETTER
- 1 Kalvos and Solomos
- 2 Archaism and kleftism
- 3 Palamas
- PART TWO SIKELIANOS
- PART THREE CAVAFY
- PART FOUR SEFERIS
- Reflections
- Further reading
- References
- Index
Summary
Kostis Palamas is a various as well as a voluminous poet, and it would be surprising if his work was not replete with references to Homer and the Homeric poems. A look at the index to the collected works of Palamas, on the other hand, reveals that Byron takes up as much space as Homer, Goethe and Victor Hugo very much more; and it cannot be maintained that the presence of Homer is central to the poetry of Palamas as it is, say, to that of Seferis. And yet, in order to understand Palamas' successors the better, we must look synoptically at the importance of Homer for his poetry.
Born in Patras and brought up in Missolonghi, Palamas was aware from an early date that his native locality, physically and culturally, looked rather towards the Ionian Islands than towards the capital, Athens. As a poet, he came to express a debt – at once envy and allegiance – to those islands that had in the mythical past produced Odysseus and had in the years shortly before Palamas's birth nurtured Solomos. The following passage which Palamas wrote about Corfu makes the feeling clear enough:
the Homeric song holds there more firmly than elsewhere its distinctive characteristics … the Homeric harmony is revealed in a more lively fashion in the light which animates and the peace that relaxes the physical beauties there … does not the poetry of Homer spread out like an intellectual heaven over the air of the place in which Solomos chose to live?… […]
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- Information
- The Shade of HomerA Study in Modern Greek Poetry, pp. 48 - 56Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989