Yannis Ritsos - Poems, Volume VI

Ritsos was the man who, like most others, sought the simple life of a family; he, too, wished to enjoy his cool wine under the shade of the grapevine, and to laugh at his daughter’s games in the family home; he, too, wished to devote his time to a simple lifestyle, however, the tense events and political situation of his era, the dichotomy of East and West, communism as opposed to the western capitalistic oriented society, and the barriers one side created to hold the other side at bay, along with the dreadful condition of the era’s society, the poverty of the majority of people, forced him to act and take a position. The side he took, not being the black pea in the soup like most people of the early twentieth century, was the side of the left, which resulted in him being persecuted and exiled twice in his life and spending a long time under house arrest, too. Surely, he maintained a positive attitude during all this; however, disillusionment eventually settled as the years passed, and while the poet kept on observing the successes and failures of the system into which he devoted his early work, that resulted in his understanding that a political system is as good as the people who run it and as these people are controlled by their littleness and self-absorption the system is due to fail, and indeed it did.