"Ritsos' breath raises a wind in which wafted and swirled flakes from the crust of our land, seeds of its vegetation and sparks of its sky. Without Ritsos' eloquence, Greeks would have forgotten how to name a major part of all those things that are there before their eyes and restoration of his work to its totality is an imperative duty to the Greek nation itself, which deserves to regain its unity after nearly forty years of strife." -- Pantelis Prevelakis "Myth in Ritsos' works on three main levels reflecting the historical background, personal memory and contemporary social problems. Due to the symbolic weight that the myth carries, it enriches the psychological truth of the real-life persons that the poet carries within, as he also carries the emotional weight of a childhood destined to crumble under disease, disaster and grief." -- Chrysa Prokopaki "Ritsos writes of seasons shifting to reflect a coming darkness. The bitter desolation that is war. Hard, sharp, hostile words that paint a time too painful to remember and yet which must be written." --Cathi Shaw ".

[H]is poems lack the compliance of subjugation and the often wounded indulgence of a narcissistic persona. What they do exhibit however, is the very authentic human endeavour of striving, reaching. imagining, and somehow, against all odds, assimilating the dissonance of an encountered self in the midst of upheaval through what he had to intuit as a metaphoric fall from grace despite his religious denouncements. This desire for a unitary reality is the value I see, feel, and admire in his work. Ritsos was a poet who lived in chaotic but exciting times, and like Odysseus, was fated by the gods to take the scenic way home. I am awed by the integrating expanse of his gaze and by the process of his mind that was able to distinguish between reality and its representation. and also. also by the sense-memory in things he projected–things lost–but still things yet to be gained.

He was a poet who survived the enchantment of rival impulses, as well as a poet who celebrated the sacred return of the imagination out of the deep ocean that contained him." -- Ilya Tourtidis ".Ritsos is always Ritsos. He suffered much personal and public violence, in the autocratic Greece of the 20th century, but his poems resist judgment. They flower with the force of humility and pathos. We readers are his brothers and children and comrades, under the hot sun which is and is not a god, beside the 'endless sea.' Love trumps Death. Every object is awake.

'Every hour is our hour.'" -- John Wall Barger.