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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 6, Issue 3 (August 1, 1931)

Poetry and Politics

Poetry and Politics.

Poets of the late 18th and early 19th centuries were apt to die young. Burns died at 37 years of age, Byron at 36, Shelley at 30, Keats at 26. But measured in terms of real poetry, the work of these men in their short lives was immense. Byron, moreover, left a political mark in the Mediterranean and the Aegean. To the Newstead Abbey ceremonies on 16th July, in honour of the young man Byron, came the Grand Old Man of Greece, Eleutherios Venizelos, who said:

Modern Greek history had been enriched with the magic of the great English poet, and nobody could think of a free Greece without thinking at the same time of Byron and his death for the freedom of Greece.

The actual vicissitudes of modern Greece and of Venizelos himself have been more strange than even a Byron could have imagined. Venezilos has been alternately Greek leader and Greek exile, even since the Great War. Yet Greece survives all attempts to break her—even the financial coup of a Minister of Finance, who in 1922, raised a forced internal loan by cutting in half all the bank notes.