Stephen Dobyns: Yannis Ritsos and the Metaphysical Moment (July 1992)

Stephen Dobyns considers the poetry of Yannis Ritsos through the lens of mystery: he posits that Ritsos may have been influenced by Swedenborgian conceptions of magic, which revolve around a belief in cosmic sympathies or natural correspondences, and argues that Ritsos’s poems work to disclose these correspondences, often through sustained attention to a single image. This attunement to interconnectedness, Dobyns suggests, could offer a meaningful alternative to dominant modes in American poetry.