William Plomer's Corfu

William Plomer, CBE (1903-1973), author of a very readable biography of Ali Pasha, was a noted South African poet who visited Corfu in 1930.

from William Plomer, Collected Poems (J. Cape. 1960).

Plomer wrote a small number of  satirical poems about Greece (one is about a rich American woman in Athens, targeted by a kamaki of those times ) in 1930. One of the less amusing (and hardly Philhellenic) ones is entitled "A Levantine", which finishes with these two stanzas:

"With Socrates as ancestor,
And gold Byzantium in his veins,
What if this weakling does not work?
    He never takes the slightest pains
    To exercise his drowsy brains.

But drinks his coffee, smokes and yawns
While new-rich empires rise and fall:
His blood is bluer than their heaven,
     Poor, but no poorer than them all.
     He has no principles at all".


This rather unpleasant (but skilful) poem foreshadows some of the more recent highly-prejudiced international diatribes against the way that Greeks manage their economy.

Two Sonnets from Selected Poems, 1940: