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: