Sensual, introspective, sometimes marginalized and sometimes emancipatory, women's poetry in Greece has a history of 26 centuries.
The first and most famous poetess of the Ancient world, Sappho, has been a timeless reference for Greek women poets. With the exception of Kassiani, one of the few hymnographers of the Middle Ages, women's poetry reemerges in post-revolutionary Greece.
In the male-dominated literary world of the 19th century, the first female poetry book is published in Syros in 1840 by Cretan origin Antonoussa Kambourakis.
In the following decades, as the number of scholarly women of bourgeois families from Istanbul, Smyrna and Athens grows, so does the publishing activity of women. Efrosyni Samartzidou, inspired by the principles of Enlightenment and editor of the women's magazine Kypseli, publishes poems in katharevousa- an archaising form of Modern Greek popular in the 19th century.
Women's increasingly widespread role as teachers, although embedded in gender stereotypes, allows them to engage in poetry without provoking reactions from the patriarchical intellectual circles. The poet-teachers of Smyrna and Constantinople exploit the didactic use of poetry, infusing it with verbose irredentism which characterizes the era. At the same time, the deep kinship and gender bonds that develop between female students in the numerous Girls' Schools in Greece and the Diaspora help to form a sense of self. It is precisely within these groups of educated ladies that women's poetic voice develops and the desire for a paradigm shift in letters and the arts is born.
The young female teachers reach far and wide in the Greek parishes and the Greek diaspora and passionately evangelize the newly emerged women's press: the Ladies' Journal (1887-1917) by Kalliroi Parren and Vosporis (Constantinople, 1899-1906), by Cornelia Preveziotou-Tavaniotou. The newly emerging female press marks a turning point for women's poetry, giving a stage for new female poets to express themselves. It also allows us to comprehend the desires, hopes and perceptions that Greek women in the newly established state nurture for themselves.
At the turn of the century, a gender-based self-consciousness begins to take shape in poetry. The eponymous publication of their work leads to self-recognition. The women poets of the time are educated polymaths, multi-talented and travelled, with achievements often in music and the visual arts, but also in the sciences - some of these women are also the first to be admitted to study STEM sciences in Universities. A bright example is Athena Tarsouli, an accomplished painter, who studied painting in Paris, who is also an ethnographer, a writer and a poet.
Young women poets are experimenting with the sonnet as a poetic genre. In the tradition of the sonnet writers of the time, they love formal lyrical norms and practice self-restraint. In the female poetic universe, motifs appear such as erotic disilussionment, melancholy, escapism, nostalgia for lost innocence and beauty, love for nature and all aspects of motherhood.
Poets such as Maria Ralli, sister of the actress Katina Paxinou, shine bright in composing sonnets, while during the interwar period, poets such as Maria Polydouri writes verses in the tradition of the Parnassians, with intense lyricism and formal perfection. Polydouri focuses on the themes of love and death, influenced by the poetry of Kostas Karyotakis and achieves an unprecedented visibility for women's poetry.
Myrtiotissa, whose work is pivotal for modern Greek women's poetic discourse, also gains recognition. Myrtiotissa speaks openly about female homosexuality, building a love discourse that is somehow a direct attack on the patriarchal and purely male perception.
"In my Tower faraway I shall wait for you my sisters, to go live together", writes Myrtiotissa in the collection "Yellow Flames", in 1925.
Her talent finds a warm supporter in the person of Kostis Palamas who expresses his appreciation by writing the preface to her books. All this paves the way for a wider recognition of women's poetry.
Melissanthi is hailed by literary circles as a "phenomenon that truly resembles a miracle", writer Ioannis Gryparis parallels her with Goethe, while the critic Markos Augeris says of her poetry "both as a feeling and as poetry and in tone and expression it is completely modern, it completely immerses itself in today's sensuality and as it searches for the spiritual taste of the world it encounters the same ancient paths of spiritual pleasure, uniting "the near and the far".
Modernism, from the 1930s, became the movement that more than anything else would influence the poetry of the time. Adopting new, free-form forms, female poets of the 1930s and beyond begin to develop a more emancipatory discourse. Zoe Karelli, Melpo Axioti and Eleni Vakalo publish in free verse, while Sofia Mavroidi-Papadaki, known for her many activities as an educator, poet and literary critic, composes the ELAS anthem in 1944.
