Angelos Sikelianos

Sikelianos was born on 28 March 1884 in Lefkada, the Ionian island whose hills, sea and country festivals fill his early poetry. He went to Athens in 1900 to study law but never finished; poetry and travel were his real education. His sister Penelope married Raymond Duncan, brother of the dancer Isadora Duncan, and through that circle Angelos met Eva Palmer, a wealthy and brilliant American from New York. They married in 1907 in Bar Harbor, Maine, and settled in Greece; their son Glafkos was born in 1909.

In the 1920s the couple devoted themselves to what Sikelianos called the Delphic Idea: the belief that Delphi could again become a spiritual centre for the world. In May 1927 and again in 1930 they staged the Delphic Festivals in the ancient stadium and theatre, with Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound and The Suppliants performed in Eva's hand-woven costumes, athletic contests and an exhibition of folk art. The festivals were a triumph and a financial catastrophe; Eva went back to America in 1933 to raise money and never returned to live with him. She died in 1952 and is buried at Delphi. In 1940 Sikelianos married Anna Karamani.

During the German occupation he stayed in Athens, wrote tragedies, and on 28 February 1943 turned the funeral of Palamas into a demonstration with his poem and his cry «Σ' αυτό το φέρετρο ακουμπά η Ελλάδα!» (On this coffin rests Greece!). He was nominated for the Nobel Prize several times in the late 1940s. He died in Athens on 19 June 1951, after being given a disinfectant by mistake instead of his medicine.

Αλαφροΐσκιωτος (The Light-Shadowed, written 1907, published 1909) is a long hymn of a young man to the Greek earth, sea and sun, in rolling free verse that sounds like nothing before it in Greek; the title is a dialect word for someone who sees visions. Πρόλογος στη ζωή (Prologue to Life, 1915–1917) is a cycle of five great odes on the consciousness of the earth, the race, woman, faith and personal creation. Μήτηρ Θεού (Mother of God, 1917–1919), written after the death of his sister Penelope, is a lament that fuses the Virgin Mary with Demeter and Persephone; the Christian and the ancient Greek are always one world for him.

He wrote long cycles, Πάσχα των Ελλήνων (Easter of the Greeks) and Δελφικός Λόγος (Delphic Discourse, 1927), and short lyrics that are his most read poems: Στ' Όσιου Λουκά το μοναστήρι (At the Monastery of Hosios Loukas), where village women sing the Easter lament, and Γιατί βαθιά μου δόξασα (Because I Deeply Praised). From 1932 he turned to tragedy: Ο Διθύραμβος του Ρόδου (The Dithyramb of the Rose), Σίβυλλα (Sibyl, 1940), Ο Δαίδαλος στην Κρήτη (Daedalus in Crete, 1943), Ο Χριστός στη Ρώμη (Christ in Rome, 1946) and Ο θάνατος του Διγενή (The Death of Digenis, 1947), plays written for a theatre that barely existed.

His collected poems appeared as Λυρικός Βίος (Lyrical Life). The register is high, prophetic, full of nature and ritual; the vocabulary draws on dialect, Byzantine hymns and ancient myth at once. He is the Greek poet for whom the sacred never died, only changed names.

Listen to Πνευματικό εμβατήριο (Spiritual March), his 1945 poem set to music by Mikis Theodorakis, with its call «Εμπρός, βοηθάτε να σηκώσουμε τον ήλιο πάνω απ' την Ελλάδα» (Forward, help us lift the sun over Greece), sung at concerts and rallies for decades. Στ' Όσιου Λουκά το μοναστήρι and Γιατί βαθιά μου δόξασα are in the school anthologies and often read at Easter. In Delphi, the house that Eva and Angelos built on the hillside is now the Museum of Delphic Festivals, with her costumes and photographs of the 1927 performances; the Delphic Festivals are also the ancestor of today's summer festivals of ancient drama. Lefkada honours him with his name on streets and a cultural centre, and his grave is in the First Cemetery of Athens, close to Palamas.

• He met his wife through the Duncans: his sister Penelope was married to Raymond Duncan, and Eva Palmer was a close friend of Isadora.
• The 1927 Delphic Festival staged Prometheus Bound in the ancient theatre of Delphi with costumes Eva had woven by hand on an ancient-style loom.
• The title Αλαφροΐσκιωτος is a folk word for a person who is «light-shadowed», that is, able to see spirits and visions.
• At Palamas's funeral in 1943 he recited his poem over the coffin and the crowd then sang the national anthem in front of the occupying soldiers.