Book launch / One hundred years since the birth of Dimitris Christodoulou

In this world, where corruption and a slippery decline from what keeps the two-legged human being strong and solid are the ideals of integrity and dignity that dominate as universal values.

In this world, where ideologies, doctrines, various religions and sects hold good, but not human happiness.

In this world, which has long ago signaled the trumpet of humanity, the noble beings distinguished among the toiling multitudes of fanaticism, these numerous perceive in time the one and essential thing: that if they want the existence of substance, they adapt themselves to rough reality and content themselves with opinion .

The wisdom that Epicurus, this great and first philanthropist, said was “the beginning of everything and the greatest good”. And he raised it above even philosophy!

So, these are the ones who think, what should be the position of poets like Dimitris Christodoulou today. The poet who was consumed young in the fire of his time. An era “without eyes of mercy” with the persecution of the defeated.

In a magnificent and nightmarish panorama (elements of the tragic!), which was transformed in his hands into a feverish and pulsating poetry of experience. As did Michalis Katsaros, Takis Sinopoulos, Thanasis Kostavaras, Manolis Anagnostakis, Kleitos Kyrou. And others, of course, obvious cases of poets of the “generation of the ’50s”, who were the blood generation par excellence.

The poet who chose to embody the awake consciousness of a world in delusion, this poet cannot but be necessary!

And, in particular, in our days when the model of man dominates, the one that Dimitris Christodoulou has cultivated throughout his life, the everywhere-presented hateful face of the vainglorious and vain predator of a delusion and vile cenology, commonly sleazy(!)

A poet like Dimitris Christodoulou, who – as I wrote elsewhere – made the experience of martial virtue a virtue of his poetry, is necessary today, when our world, sinking into guilty silence, is treacherously addicted to continuous and unaccountable decline and falters and collapses in disrepute .

This poet is necessary, as through his work, especially his poetry, the man who wants and strives to be called Man develops and emerges!

* Ilias Gris is a poet.

Present and politically active in troubled years*

Dimitris Christodoulou (1924-1991) was one of the best-known poets of the First Post-War Generation during the years of the 1967 dictatorship and very prominent after the Post-colonization. It is not only his multi-volume poetic work, successive collections from 1952 to 1988, nor his many prose works and his plays. It is his composed songs that made him known and loved by the general public, because they precisely caught the pulse of the Greek society of his time and their creator listened to both the pains and desires of the popular strata; they even touched the political sensibilities of strata with democratic ideas of the middle class, which opposed the military regime.

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We began our perusal, wanting to briefly show the general picture that existed of Christodoulou and his work, as we experienced it during the years of his active production and heyday, indirectly showing the necessity of publishing this volume. In other words, if this poet was successful thanks to his lyrical sensibility, we must not forget that a key aspect of his poetry was that he felt and declared himself as a poet. The poet Ilias Gris wanted to justify the today marginalized poetry of Christodoulou with his anthology.

Dimitris Christodoulou was a representative of an era, in the sense that he observed experientially and vividly captured in his poetry mainly what was done from 1950 to 1990, certainly bringing with him memories of the Second World War, the resistance and the first civil years. In other words, he was present and politically active in the events of those years, which are recognizable in terms of their historical source in his first collections, in contrast to the war years, when he had joined the EAM at a young age, the epic character which are missing from his poetry, despite the fact that indelible memories of those days permeate his early work, in which the belief in moral values ​​and principles for the creation of a world with a humanitarian vision is evident.

* Excerpt from “Dimitris Christodoulou, Poems, Anthology”, Anthology – Editor: Ilias Gris, Epitome: Theodosis Pylarinos, Metronomos Publications