Ritsos views modern man as the sum of the possibilities of his past. If those possibilities are less than evident in the present, then the task of modern man is to touch again in himself that heroic resource in his race to insure an influence over the future. Just as modern man in Ritsos' works must refuse the crushing weight of past myths that humiliate and diminish him, so must he have a say in determining his future fate, not, as in [George Seferis], in merely enduring it. Ritsos rejects Seferis' aristocratic and pessimistic view, a view reflecting a major strain in postwar poetry, which sees the past as a standard of greatness, a measure against which modern man can only be found wanting; he rejects Seferis' implication that there can be no thought of a future because modern man has none.

Yannis Ritsos' abiding interest is in...