Andreas Kalvos

Kalvos was born in April 1792 on Zakynthos, then still Venetian, and his life was a long exile. In 1802 his father took him and his younger brother to Livorno in Italy, leaving their mother behind; Kalvos never saw her again. He grew up Italian-speaking and in 1812, in Florence, met the poet Ugo Foscolo, who made him his secretary and pupil. He followed Foscolo to Switzerland and London in 1816, where he taught languages and married an Englishwoman, Maria Theresa Thomas, who died in 1820 together with their infant daughter.

Back in Florence he joined the Carbonari, the secret society of Italian liberals, and was expelled from Tuscany in 1821, the year the Greek Revolution began. In Geneva he published Η Λύρα (1824), ten odes, and in Paris Λυρικά (1826), ten more. In 1826 he sailed to Nafplio to serve the Revolution, was disgusted by the factional fighting and withdrew to British-ruled Corfu, where he taught at the Ionian Academy and in private schools for a quarter of a century, writing no more Greek poetry.

In 1852 he left for England with his second wife, Charlotte Augusta Wadams, and ran a girls' school with her in the Lincolnshire market town of Louth. He died there on 3 November 1869. In 1960 his remains, and hers, were brought to Zakynthos and placed beside Dionysios Solomos, the other great poet of the island, whom he had never met.

The twenty odes are poems of the Greek War of Independence written from a distance, in a Greek no one had ever spoken: an archaic, Homeric-tinged idiom mixed with the demotic, with forms such as ας έχωσι and words like χάλκεον. Kalvos invented a stanza for them, four short unrhymed lines followed by a fifth of five syllables, which gives the odes a solemn, marching rhythm quite unlike the folk-song metre of Solomos.

Ο Φιλόπατρις (The Patriot), the first ode, addresses Zakynthos as ω φιλτάτη πατρίς and ends with the wish not to be buried in foreign soil, a wish that fate ignored. Εις Σάμον (To Samos) opens with the stanza everyone knows: those who feel the bronze hand of fear may keep the yoke of slavery; freedom needs virtue and daring. Εις Ψαρά and Εις Χίον mourn the islands destroyed by the Ottomans in 1822 and 1824; Εις Σούλι and Εις Πάργαν honour the Epirote strongholds; Ο Ωκεανός (The Ocean) and Τα Ηφαίστεια (The Volcanoes) turn to the sea and the Greek fire-ships. Εις Θάνατον (To Death) remembers his mother appearing to him in a dream.

Behind the patriotic themes stand the classical ideals he absorbed from Foscolo: virtue, liberty, the moral grandeur of nature. The odes are abstract and statuesque rather than tender, and their vocabulary needs a dictionary even for native speakers, which is exactly why Seferis admired their strangeness.

Θέλει αρετήν και τόλμην η ελευθερία is quoted in parliament, in newspaper headlines and on school walls; few Greeks know the rest of the ode, but everyone knows that line. The odes returned to life in 1889, when Kostis Palamas gave a lecture on 'Kalvos the Zakynthian', and again in the 1930s and 1940s through Seferis's essays; today Εις Σάμον is in the Lyceum literature anthology. On Zakynthos the Museum of Solomos and Eminent Zakynthians houses the mausoleum with the tombs of Solomos and Kalvos side by side; in Louth, England, a plaque marks the house where he died. Streets named Κάλβου exist in Athens and many towns. Listening to a good reading of Ο Φιλόπατρις is the best way to hear his rhythm.

• He wrote twenty Greek poems in his whole life, all between about 1823 and 1826, and then, for more than forty years, not one more.
• Before his Greek odes he wrote tragedies and poems in Italian, and in England he published a textbook of Italian grammar.
• His first ode wishes for a grave in his homeland; he died in an English market town and reached Zakynthos only in 1960, ninety-one years later.
• Kalvos and Solomos, both born on Zakynthos and both writing the Revolution, never met, and now lie in the same mausoleum.