Andreas Embirikos Biography

Andreas Embirikos (Brăila, 2 September 1901 – 3 August 1975, Athens) was a Greek surrealist poet and the first Greek psychoanalyst.

Embirikos came from a wealthy family as his father was an important ship-owner. He was born in Brăila, Romania, but his family soon moved to Ermoupolis in Syros. When Embirikos was only seven years old they moved to Athens. While he was still a teenager his parents divorced; he started studying at the Faculty of Philosophy of the National and Capodistrian University of Athens, but he decided to move to Lausanne to stay with his mother.

The following years Embirikos studied a variety of subjects both in France and in the United Kingdom where he studies at King's College London; however it was in Paris where he decided to study psychanalysis together with René Laforgue.

His poetry can be defined by two major tendencies. On the one hand, he was one of the major representatives of surrealism in Greece. His first poetic collection, Ipsikaminos, was a heretic book, characterized by the lack of the punctuation and the peculiarity of the language. As the poet himself admitted it was precisely the originality and extravagance of his work that contributed to his relative commercial success.

On the other hand, together with Yorgos Seferis, Embirikos was the most important representative of the "Generation of the '30s". He contributed greatly to the introduction of modernism in Greek letters and he helped change once and for all the poetic atmosphere of Greece.