SOURCE: An introduction to Angelos Sikelianos: Selected Poems, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, Princeton University Press, 1979, pp. xiii-xx.

In the following essay, Keeley and Sherrard underscore Sikelianos's affirmation of the natural world and his conception of the poet as prophet.

Angelos Sikelianos (1884-1951) is a traditional poet in both the craft and thought that he gave to his art, more so perhaps than Cavafy, who was twenty years his senior, and Seferis, who was by fewer years his junior. Broadly speaking, there are two main aspects to his poetry: on the one hand, the lyrical affirmation of the natural world and of the human body as part of it, and on the other, the vision of the seer who knows that the natural world is doomed to tragic suffering and who aspires “to rise above this flesh-consuming rhythm” in order to find fulfillment in another order...