Comments & Greek artists, modern Greek artists: If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays...

Poets & contemporary Greek artists, Greek painters


Γιάννης Σταύρου, Στο κύμα, λάδι σε καμβά

"The poet of the poet's"...

According to William Butler Yeats he was "a solitary volcano"...

Maybe, the greatest poet of the 20th century...



Ezra Pound
Cando 49

For the seven lakes, and by no man these verses:
Rain; empty river; a voyage,
Fire from frozen cloud, heavy rain in the twilight
Under the cabin roof was one lantern.
The reeds are heavy; bent;
and the bamboos speak as if weeping.

Autumn moon; hills rise about lakes
against sunset
Evening is like a curtain of cloud,
a blurr above ripples; and through it
sharp long spikes of the cinnamon,
a cold tune amid reeds.
Behind hill the monk's bell
borne on the wind.
Sail passed here in April; may return in October
Boat fades in silver; slowly;
Sun blaze alone on the river.

Where wine flag catches the sunset
Sparse chimneys smoke in the cross light

Comes then snow scur on the river
And a world is covered with jade
Small boat floats like a lanthorn,
The flowing water closts as with cold. And at San Yin
they are a people of leisure.

Wild geese swoop to the sand-bar,
Clouds gather about the hole of the window
Broad water; geese line out with the autumn
Rooks clatter over the fishermen's lanthorns,

A light moves on the north sky line;
where the young boys prod stones for shrimp.
In seventeen hundred came Tsing to these hill lakes.
A light moves on the South sky line.

State by creating riches shd. thereby get into debt?
Thsi is infamy; this is Geryon.
This canal goes still to TenShi
Though the old king built it for pleasure

K E I M E N R A N K E I
K I U M A N M A N K E I
JITSU GETSU K O K W A
T A N FUKU T A N K A I

Sun up; work
sundown; to rest
dig well and drink of the water
dig field; eat of the grain
Imperial power is? and to us what is it?

The fourth; the dimension of stillness.
And the power over wild beasts.

And the days are not full enough

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass

Some of his quotations

• A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
• Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
• Good art however "immoral" is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.
• Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
• If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
• In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
• Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.
• Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.
• Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.
• The image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.
• The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.
• The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.