Means and beginnings: Voicing revolution in Solomos’s early work

Abstract

In this article I read the figurations of poetic voice in Solomos’s early lyric ‘Spiligga’ as a testing site for the conceptualization of the Greek Revolution as a modern political event. Perusing its thematic, intertextual and formal strategies, I argue that two distinct poetic voices are operative in the poem. The first model is commensurate with the voice of nature. The second is a medium of reflective and expressive human speech able to herald the revolution. In order to ascertain the political significance of this juxtaposition, I procure insights from seminal studies in intellectual history that outline the transformations of the term ‘revolution’ at the turn of the eighteenth century (Arendt, Koselleck). The period’s new understanding of the term as an absolute and inaugurating break from an existing state of affairs (which supplanted the previous meaning of revolution as quasi-natural experience that precludes innovation) illuminates the juxtaposition by Solomos of the two models of voice: they represent the revolutionary fissure as an exit from the state of nature and as the innovation of a new order. This reading not only elucidates the encounter of modern revolution and poetry in ‘Spiligga’ but also establishes the latter as a necessary starting point for the examination of this encounter in Solomos’s later works.