David Ricks

King's College London | KCL · Department of Classics

Like the shot fired at Concord, Massachusetts, in 1775, the Greek Revolution was heard around the world, and many poets, Byron and Hugo among them, fired off their own poetry in response. This lecture will turn to Greek poetic responses to the ‘21—and not just at the time, but as the noise of old battles has echoed through subsequent decades of Gre...

This paper analyses a cluster of major Greek poets since 1880 who have referred to key figures from the history of Neoplatonism as a foil to their ancestral Greek Orthodoxy. Though that foil sometimes takes the form of a rejection -- 'Thou hast conquered, o pale Galilaean!' -- it can operate in a variety of ways. Among the cases discussed are Kosti...

This pioneering volume provides the first comparative overview of the interface between Neoplatonism and poetry in the greater Mediterranean, from Late Antiquity to the present day. The introductory chapter presents the thought of Plotinus (d. 270), the founder of Neoplatonism, as rooted in both Greek and Oriental sources and explains his key princ...

Review of: Ο kalvos sta ichni tou ‘longinou’: Enas anthropos ton grammaton stin evropi tou 19ou aiona (‘Kalvos in the footsteps of “Longinus”: A man of letters in nineteenth-century Europe’), Angela Yioti (2019) Athens: Antipodes, 478 pp., ISBN 978-618-5267-05-6, p/bk, €18.00

Every Greek and every friend of the country knows the date 1821, when the banner of revolution was raised against the empire of the Ottoman Turks, and the story of 'Modern Greece' is usually said to begin. Less well known, but of even greater importance, was the international recognition given to Greece as an independent state with full sovereign r...

This chapter looks at the reception of Homer in the Greek Civil War of 1946-9 and its aftermath. It argues that this conflict prevented straightforward assimilations of Homeric poetry, and that although poets continued to use Homer, they were much more likely to treat themes such as fratricidal strife or betrayal, or to revisit characters who are f...

Sikelianos Angelos , Grammata, ed., Bournazakis Kostas , 2 vols. Athens: Ikaros, 2000. Pp. 665, 654. - Volume 29 Issue 1 - David Ricks

It has been recognized that Sachtouris's poetry is intimately related to the Greek ballads. This paper aims first to locate Sachtouris within a long and diverse modern Greek tradition of poetic dialogue with folk poetry, and then to examine, through close readings of five diagnostic poems from the period 1945-1956, how the folk tradition comes to f...

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. (T.S. Eliot)

Meaningful allusion to the classics in Papadiamandis's work is not a matter of the text's being stuffed with overt classical references. In his early novels we find a large number of, as it were, classical one-liners: essentially undigested – or at best opportunistic – allusions. The technique is a less focused form of Roidis's in Pope Joan; perhap...

1. An example of particular importance, which might form the core of a course aimed at comparatists (and embracing in addition the earlier poetry of Ezra Pound) would be an examination of Cavafy in relation to Browning. See Keeley 1952: 99–134, with additional comments in Ricks 1988: 181–182 and my forthcoming paper in the Proceedings of the First...

Thanks to the work of Stylianos Alexiou, the Escorial version of Digenes Akrites (hereafter ‘E’;) has taken its rightful place as part of the heroic poetry of medieval Christendom. Even if the claim for E's priority over the Grottaferrata version (G) does not meet with universal acceptance, E is at least in the field as an alternative. There are, p...

This article's title is a sweeping one, but this is in fact a discussion of just two poems by Cavafy – and both of those on mythological subjects. The aim is, in a small way, to bridge the gap between myth and history in Cavafy's poetry; the title hints that this is by way of a respectful response to D.N. Maronitis' valuable survey, ‘C.P. Cavafy: a...

It has been recognized that Sachtouris’s poetry is intimately related to the Greek ballads. This paper aims first to locate Sachtouris within a long and diverse modern Greek tradition of poetic dialogue with folk poetry, and then to examine, through close readings of five diagnostic poems from the period 1945‐1956, how the folk tradition comes to f...