ION

KOSTES PALAMAS[1]

A NEW WORLD-POET

_And then I saw that I am the poet, surely a poet among many
a mere soldier of the verse, but always the poet who desires
to close within his verse the longings and questionings of the
universal man, and the cares and fanaticism of the citizen. I
may not be a worthy citizen; but it cannot be that I am the
poet of myself alone. I am the poet of my age and of my race.
And what I hold within me cannot be divided from the world
without._

KOSTES PALAMAS, Preface to _The Twelve Words of the Gypsy_.

_Kostes Palamas ... is raised not only above other poets of
Modern Greece but above all the poets of contemporary Europe.
Though he is not the most known ... he is incontestably the
greatest._

EUGENE CLEMENT, _Revue des Etudes Grecques_.

I
THE STRUGGLE

Kostes Palamas! A name I hated once with all the sincerity of a young
and blind enthusiast as the name of a traitor. This is no exaggeration.
I was a student in the third class of an Athenian Gymnasion in 1901,
when the Gospel Riots stained with blood the streets of Athens. The
cause of the riots was a translation of the New Testament into the
people's tongue by Alexandros Pallis, one of the great leaders of the
literary renaissance of Modern Greece. The translation appeared in
series in the daily newspaper _Akropolis_. The students of the
University, animated by the fiery speeches of one of their Professors,
George Mistriotes, the bulwark of the unreconcilable Purists, who would
model the modern language of Greece after the ancient, regarded this
translation as a treacherous profanation both of the sacred text and of
the national speech. The demotikists, branded under the name of [Greek:
Malliaroi] "the hairy ones," were thought even by serious people to be
national traitors, the creators of a mysterious propaganda seeking to
crush the aspirations of the Greek people by showing that their language
was not the ancient Greek language and that they were not the heirs of
Ancient Greece.

Three names among the "Hairy Ones" were the object of universal
detestation: John Psicharis, the well known Greek Professor in Paris,
the author of many works and of the first complete Grammar of the
people's idiom; Alexandros Pallis, the translator of the Iliad and of
the New Testament; and Kostes Palamas, secretary of the University of
Athens, the poet of this "anti-nati