Dionysios Solomos

Dionysios Solomos: The Poet Who Gave Greece Its Voice and Its Anthem

He died believing his life's work had failed. Only one poem, dashed off in a burst of inspiration in 1823, had ever reached the public in finished form; everything else lay in fragments, drafts, and false starts he refused to publish. That one poem is now sung before nearly every Greek public event, and the poet the nation now calls its own remains, paradoxically, best known for the work he considered least representative of what he was trying to do.

A Count's Illegitimate Son

Dionysios Solomos was born on April 8, 1798, on the Ionian island of Zakynthos, the son of Count Nikolaos Solomos and his housekeeper, Angeliki Nikli. Born out of wedlock, he was legitimized when his dying father married his mother shortly before his death on February 27, 1807, making the nine-year-old a co-heir to the family estate. His guardian, following Ionian noble custom, sent him to Italy that year to study — first at the Lyceum of St. Catherine in Venice, then in Cremona, where he finished secondary school in 1815, before enrolling in the law faculty at Pavia University, from which he graduated in 1817.

An Italian Poet in Training

For a decade, Solomos immersed himself entirely in Italian letters, writing verse in Italian and befriending the exiled poet Ugo Foscolo, himself from the Ionian Islands. By the time he returned to Zakynthos in 1818, he was, by training and instinct, an Italian poet — fluent, accomplished, and accepted in Italian literary circles, with his early Italian poems later collected as *Rime Improvvisate* in 1822. Greek was, for him, still a language to be learned rather than a native poetic tongue.

The Challenge That Changed Him

In 1822, the statesman and man of letters Spyridon Trikoupis visited Zakynthos and heard Solomos read one of his Italian odes. Trikoupis's response became one of the defining anecdotes of modern Greek literature: "Your poetic aptitude reserves for you a select place on the Italian Parnassus. But the first places there are already taken. The Greek Parnassus does not yet have its Dante." The challenge worked. Solomos began deliberately studying demotic Greek — the living, spoken language of ordinary Greeks — along with Cretan literature and folk song, choosing it over katharevousa, the artificial, classicizing Greek favored by much of the educated elite. There were no real precedents for a serious literary Greek built on the demotic; Solomos had to build the models himself, producing what became the first substantial body of literature in the demotic dialect.

The Hymn That Became an Anthem

The Greek War of Independence, which broke out in 1821, gave Solomos his subject. In May 1823 he completed the "Hymn to Liberty," a 158-stanza ode addressing Liberty as a figure "reborn and renewed out of the sacred bones of the Greeks," touching on events of the uprising including the execution of Patriarch Gregory V and the sieges at Tripolitsa and Mesolongi, and invoking foreign sympathizers including "the heartfelt joy of Washington's land." Published in besieged Mesolongi in 1824 and in Paris in 1825 with a French translation, it made Solomos internationally known almost overnight — the only major recognition he received in his lifetime, since almost nothing else he wrote was published while he lived. Nikolaos Mantzaros set it to music in 1828; the first two stanzas became the Greek national anthem in the 1860s following the union of the Ionian Islands with Greece, and Cyprus adopted it as its own anthem in 1966. Printed in full in London in 1873, it remains, by length of text, the longest national anthem in the world.

A Body of Unfinished Masterpieces

Nearly everything Solomos wrote after the Hymn stayed incomplete. "The Cretan" (1833), a dramatic monologue in fifteen-syllable verse about a refugee from Crete's failed 1826 revolution, introduced the enigmatic "moon-dressed" figure that scholars have read as everything from the narrator's dying fiancée to a symbol of the motherland itself. "The Free Besieged," worked on from 1826 to 1845 and inspired by the third siege of Mesolongi, survives only as multiple fragmentary drafts, yet is often judged the high point of modern Greek poetry despite — or because of — its incompleteness. He also left unfinished the romantic tragedy "Lampros," the satirical prose poem "The Woman of Zakynthos," an ode on the death of Lord Byron written after Byron died at Mesolongi, and "The Shark," inspired by a real shark attack in Corfu harbor. Of "Lampros" he is reported to have said simply that it "will remain an abstract, because the whole poem does not reach the height of some days" — a perfectionist's epitaph for his own method.

Teacher of a School

In the 1830s Solomos moved to Corfu, the Ionian Islands' intellectual capital, partly to escape a bitter, years-long inheritance dispute with his half-brother that damaged his relationship with his own mother and pushed him toward withdrawal from public life. In Corfu he read German Romantic philosophy and poetry — Hegel, Schlegel, Schiller, Goethe — through Italian translation, and became the central figure of what is now called the Heptanese School, mentoring poets including Iakovos Polylas, Ioulios Typaldos, and Gerasimos Markoras, who became known as the "Solomian poets." His late years brought declining health, a series of strokes, and increasing irritability that estranged even close friends, though he reconciled with Polylas before his death. He died of apoplexy in February 1857 at age 58; Corfu's theater closed, the Ionian Parliament suspended its sessions, and public mourning was declared.

Why Dionysios Is Called a Genius

Solomos's genius is linguistic and architectural rather than merely lyrical: he built, more or less from nothing, a literary register out of a spoken vernacular that had never before carried the weight of serious poetry, fusing folk song, Cretan Renaissance literature, and European Romanticism into a form flexible enough for both a rousing national anthem and the most demanding, fragmented late poems. His own contemporaries did not fully see this — when his friend and editor Iakovos Polylas published the collected manuscripts in 1859, the poet and critic Aristotelis Valaoritis complained that the nation's hopes had been "deceived," left with only "a hymn and some incoherent verses." It took until roughly 1880, when Kostis Palamas reassessed the fragments as a form of proto-modernist pure poetry rather than failure, for Solomos's reputation to be rebuilt on his actual, unfinished body of work rather than on the Hymn alone. The honest complication is that Solomos never finished his most ambitious poems, and it remains debated among scholars whether that fragmentation reflects visionary perfectionism, psychological strain from the inheritance trials, or simply an artist who kept revising and never stopped.

Legacy

Solomos's remains were moved to Zakynthos in 1865, and a museum dedicated to him and other notable Zakynthians has held them since. Generations of major Greek poets, including Palamas and later figures, have named him as the founder they measure themselves against, and Greece's designation of him as "national poet" rests less on the anthem alone than on his demonstration that the everyday Greek language could carry a literature equal to any in Europe.