Yannis Ritsos is the old-fashioned kind of great poet. His output has been enormous, his life heroic and eventful, his voice is an embodiment of national courage, his mind is tirelessly active. In a sense he belongs to the modern movement, but he is closer to Neruda, or even to Vallejo, and to Brecht, than he is to Seferis or to Yeats or Laforgue. The modernism of the left in poetry is a special behaviour of language; in it the socialism of poets insists on the details of the real world, nothing is left ignoble or merely disorientated, and modern techniques of poetry cry out with the same passion for detailed realities. Ritsos is one of the greatest poets now living; in French he has been well served by Dominique Grandmont but until recently he has hardly been available at all in England. Nikos Stangos produced the first...