Yannis Ritsos and the poetry of witness

It’s tempting to read the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos, who died in 1990 at the age of 81, as an embodiment (of sorts) of Percy Bysshe Shelley's admonition that “[p]oets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” A lifelong communist, he was sent into internal exile in the late 1940s and later held under house arrest after a military dictatorship took over Greece in 1967.

By David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Critic

January 2, 2013