Political Verse - Importance

Importance

The Political verse characterizes traditional Greek poetry, especially between 1100 and 1850. It is the verse in which most Greek folk songs are written, including such temporally distant works as the medieval Cretan romance "Erotokritos" and the 3rd draft of Dionysios Solomos' "The Free Besieged", considered the masterpiece of modern Greek poetry. It is thought that the political verse replaced, in popularity and also in use, the famous dactylic hexameter of the ancient Greeks (also known as "heroic hexameter") in later Greek poetry, from the time of the early modern Greek, following the loss of ancient prosody and pitch accent, being ideally suited to its replacement, stress accent. This metric form comes “natural” in modern Greek (that is the common Greek, spoken after the 9th or 10th century to the present day), and it is extremely easy to form a “poem” or a “distich” in political verse, almost without a thought. In fact it is such a natural meter for the language that one could actually form continually ones' everyday speech in political verse, if one wished to do so.