the earliest great poet of Modern Greece.
The passing away of Valaorites left Rangabes, the relentless purist, the
monarch of the literary world. He was considered as the master whom
every one should aspire to imitate. His language, ultra-puristic, had
travelled leagues away from the people without approaching at all the
splendor of the ancient speech. But the purists drew great delight from
reading his works and clapped their hands with satisfaction on seeing
how near Plato and Aeschylus they had managed to come.

Young and susceptible to the popular currents of the literary world,
Palamas, too, worshipped the established idol, and offered his
frankincense in verses modelled after Rangabean conceptions. In the same
essay to which I have just referred, he tells us of the life he led with
another young friend, likewise a literary aspirant, during the years of
his attendance at the University. The two lived and worked together.
They wrote poems in the puristic language and compared their works in
stimulating friendliness. But soon they realized the truth that if
poetry is to be eternal, it must express the individual through the
voice of the world to which the individual belongs and through the
language which the people speak.

This truth took deep roots in the mind of Palamas. His conviction grew
into a religion permeated with the warmth, earnestness, and devotion
that martyrs only have shown to their cause. Believing that purism was
nothing but a blind attempt to drown the living traditions of the people
and to conceal its nature under a specious mantle of shallow
gorgeousness, he has given his talent and his heart to save his nation
from such a calamity. In this great struggle, he has suffered not a
little. When the popular fury rose against his cause, and he was
blackened as a traitor and a renegade, he wrote in words illustrating
his inner agony:

I labored long to create the statue for the Temple
Of stone that I had found,
To set it up in nakedness, and then to pass;
To pass but not to die.

And I created it. But narrow men who bow
To worship shapeless wooden images, ill clad,
With hostile glances and with shudderings of fear,
Looked down upon us, work and worker, angrily.

My statue in the rubbish thrown! And I, an exile!
To foreign lands I led my restless wanderings;
But ere I left, a sacrifice unheard I offered:
I dug a pit, and in the pit I laid my statue.