During his lifetime, Dionysios Solomos published only four of his poems by his own will. Thus, the national mourning for his death in 1857 was balanced by the hope that his mature works would be published—works which, according to his friends, surpassed his early ones and constituted a new poetry of unparalleled beauty. However, when the Ionian society learned that only fragments and drafts had survived from the much-rumored unpublished oeuvre, hope turned into disappointment.
Iakovos Polylas, a loyal friend and student of the poet, was destined to become his first systematic critic and posthumous editor. He preserved Solomos’ manuscripts and organized their chaotic disorder to produce readable texts. Yet, when he published the Evriskomena (Collected Works) in 1859, the book not only failed to change the negative atmosphere that had formed but actually intensified it, as the Ionian and Athenian newspapers that had welcomed the future publication of Solomos’ works in 1857 did not dedicate even a single line to it.
Things changed dramatically in the 1890s with the decisive intervention of Kostis Palamas, who highlighted the importance of the Euriskomena. These works introduced the Greek nation to its foremost poet and, through Polylas’ “Prolegomena,” to its foremost literary critic—thus marking the birth of modern Greek poetry and literary criticism.
From the afterword by Dimitris Polychronakis