Dionysios Solomos Poems - Dionysios Solomos was a Greek poet from Zakynthos.
He is best known for writing the Hymn to Liberty of which the first two stanzas, set to music by Nikolaos Mantzaros, became the Greek national anthem in 1865. He was the central figure of the Heptanese School of poetry, and is considered the national poet of Greece - not only because he wrote the national anthem, but also because he contributed to the preservation of earlier poetic tradition and highlighted its usefulness to modern literature.
Dionysius Solomos has been called by many the "father of modern Greek poetry" in that it was he who, in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, rebaptized Greek poetry in the ancestral springs of inspiration and language and gave it an orientation that has been followed by such major poets as Palamas, Sikelianos and Seferis. "With Solomos," Zissimos Lorenzatos has written, "the problem of artistic expression enters our cultural life, as the problem of independence entered our national life."
