Collected edition of the poems of Titos Patrikios, Volume A, 1943-1959.

VERSes, 2

Verses that scream, verses that rise like bayonets, verses that threaten the established order and within their few feet either make or overturn the revolution, useless, false, boastful, because no verse today can overthrow regimes, no verse mobilizes the masses. (Which masses? Between us now – who thinks about the masses? At most a personal salvation, if not emergence.) That’s why I no longer write to offer paper rifles, weapons made of idle and hollow words. Just to lift a corner of the truth, to shed a little light on our forged life. As much as I can, and as long as I endure.

August 1957 ❧

“However, more than the fighting years of the resistance during the occupation, the personal morality of Patrikios is defined by the conditions of exile. Isolation, destitution, physical decay, erotic thirst and nostalgia, mental lethargy are dramatized with increasing frequency, especially in the period of the 'Apprenticeship'. A resultant motif of these conditions is the anthropology of survival with all its degenerative syndromes: the reintegration of the outcast into public life is internally undermined by the ghosts of dead friends and the memories of a friendship that has been definitively dismantled.

However, the theme that intensifies with the passage of time for Patrikios is the exercise and function of poetry within the political and party sphere: the limits of its effectiveness, its relieving escapes, its elective drama in relation to common events.” D. N. Marronitis, Poetics and Political Morality, 1976