SOURCE: “Sikelianos: The Sublime Voice,” in Modern Greek Poetry: Voice and Myth, Princeton University Press, 1983, pp. 31-52.

In the following essay, Keeley places Sikelianos's later poetry within its historical and social context.

Readers of contemporary Western poetry in the English-speaking world are usually familiar with the work of C. P. Cavafy and George Seferis to some degree and of Odysseus Elytis and Yannis Ritsos to a lesser degree, but very few have read Angelos Sikelianos (1884-1951), the poet who was next in importance to Cavafy in establishing the demotic tradition during the first half of this century and who was considered by Seferis to be equivalent in stature within that tradition to Yeats within ours. My principal concern here is with Sikelianos's late and, to my mind, his best poems, but given the general lack of access to him in the original outside Greece and the strictly selected...