The career of Yannis Ritsos has been uncomfortably paradigmatic of the political fortunes of his native Greece. For much of this century Ritsos has been a major poetic spokesman of freedom; and for much of his life he has paid the penalty for his refusal to be silent. (p. 26)

Ritsos' strengths are also weaknesses because he writes so much and publishes so much of what he writes…. Clearly this is a poet for whom writing all the time has been both mode and symbol of survival under mostly adverse circumstances—a confirmation not merely of political steadfastness but of life itself.

The danger, of course, is that so unflagging an utterance will lose in precision, compression, and felicity what it gains in breadth and depth. Ritsos' work lacks the verbal inevitability that makes us memorize a poem without effort. He seldom treats a subject in such a way...