[In The Fourth Dimension,] Dalven's translations convey the style and verve of the poetry with considerable success….

[But here] it must be said that, in view of the considerable claims often made for it, Ritsos's poetry is disappointing. This is not great poetry. Too much of it is merely episodic, a matter of sensation, of a piling-up of endless accidental details not fused by any overriding imaginative or intellectual vision. Great poetry is written within a tradition shaped by master after master and learned in deliberate study and detachment. Modern Greek poets like Solomos, Sikelianos or Seferis belong to such a tradition. Ritsos does not. Nor, in spite of the fact that Theodorakis has set some of his poems to music is his poetry that of the people, of ballads and songs handed on from generation to generation.

Ritsos's poetry belongs to an in-between world, to a disinherited...