The Bottom of The Well: Bloodshed, Ballads, and the Poetry of Miltos Sachtouris

It has been recognized that Sachtouris's poetry is intimately related to the Greek ballads. This paper aims first to locate Sachtouris within a long and diverse modern Greek tradition of poetic dialogue with folk poetry, and then to examine, through close readings of five diagnostic poems from the period 1945-1956, how the folk tradition comes to function in the work of an individual poet in a new, post-World War II context. Affinities in theme, diction, and versification can be illuminated so as to illustrate Sachtouris's recourse to the darker side of the ballad tradition, which may be understood as a form of collective psychotherapy.