Chapter 3 is a thematic biography of Dionysios Solomos (1798–1857), Greece’s official ‘national poet’. It starts by narrating Solomos’s Italian education and his early attempts at composing Italian poetry. In following the poet’s return to his native Ionians Islands, it then focuses on his conscious but difficult decision to transform himself from an Italian into a Greek poet and an advocate of the principles of the Greek revolution and Byronic philhellenism. By bringing into attention the Italian matrix of Solomos’s Greek verses, as well as his return to Italian poetry-writing during the last years of his life, the chapter challenges idealized and teleological perceptions of the poet’s nationality and argues that Solomos was and remained a bicultural intellectual.
From Eugenio Montale to Amelia Rosselli. Italian Poetry in the Sixties and Seventies (review)