_In Palamas, we have found every trait of the Greek character:
He is religious and superstitious; a skeptic, a pagan, and a
pantheist.... He is a poet and a philosopher.... He abandons
himself to every impulse of the Greek soul. But he is always
fond of drawing back, of concentrating, of trying to encompass
in a general form the sensations and ideas which sway him. His
principal and latent care is to analyze himself and his world.
A poet and a thinker, Palamas does not attract the multitudes....
With him everything is a mingling of lights and shadows.... But
through his work Greece of today is most clearly set forth._
TIGRANE YERGATE, "Le Mouvement litteraire grec; La Poesie."
_La Revue_, June, 1903, vol. xlv, p. 717 f.
With _Life Immovable_, the poetic genius of Kostes Palamas reaches its
full strength. The poet, who, from his very first work, _The Songs of my
Country_, had shown his power in selecting his sources of inspiration
and in weaving the essence of purely national airs into his "light
sketches of sea and olive groves and the various sunlit aspects of Greek
life,"[3] continues to broaden his vision and art through an
unquenchable eagerness for knowledge, for an understanding of things
beautiful, whether present or past, concrete or abstract. He makes broad
strides from his _Hymn to Athena_, to _The Eyes of My Soul_, _Iambs and
Anapests_, and _The Grave_. In all "the pathetic and the common meet
inseparably with an art exact and full of grace, an art that knows its
purpose."[4] But in _Life Immovable_ Palamas rises above the Hellenic
horizon, and strikes the strings of the universal heart in the same
degree as the towns of Patras, Missolonghi, and Athens expand into
Greece and Greece into the world. After all there is both realism and
symbolism in the fact that the first poem of the volume reflects the
atmosphere of the poet's native town while one of the latter ones "The
Ascrean" is filled with an all-including world-vision.
The present volume contains only the first half of _Life Immovable_. It
consists of five collections of poems: The "Fatherlands," "The Return,"
"Fragments from the Song to the Sun," "Verses of a Familiar Tune," and
"The Palm Tree." On the whole, a careful study of these collections
would furnish the key to an adequate understanding of the rest of the
poet's works for which these poems are faithful preludes. For this
reason I am tempted to give an analysis of the translated parts as a
guide to their understanding. But it is by no means my wish to lay down
a fast rule; poetry is no exact science and there should be always ample
room for freedom of suggestion and of view.