Andreas Kalvos

Andreas Kalvos (Greek: Ἀνδρέας Κάλβος, also transliterated as Andreas Calvos; 1 April 1792 – November 3, 1869) was a Greek poet of the Romantic school. He published only two collections of poems — the Lyra of 1824 and the Lyrica of 1826. He was a contemporary of the poets Ugo Foscolo and Dionysios Solomos. He was among the representatives of the Heptanese School of literature. No portrait of him is known.

Andreas Calvos was born in April 1792 on the island of Zacynthos (then ruled by the Venetian Republic), the elder of the two sons of Ioannes Calvos and Andriane Calvos (née Roucane). His mother came from an established, landowning family. His younger brother, Nicolaos, was born in 1794. In 1802, when Andreas was ten years old, his father took him and Nicolaos, but not his wife, to Livorno (Leghorn) in Italy, where his brother was consul for the Ionian Islands and where there was a Greek community. The two boys never saw their mother again. In 1805 Calvos's mother obtained a divorce on the grounds of desertion; and shortly afterwards remarried. In Livorno, Andreas first studied ancient Greek and Latin literature and history.

In Livorno in 1811 he wrote his Italian Hymn to Napoleon, an anti-war poem that he later repudiated (this is how we know of its existence, as the poem itself was not saved). Around the same time he lived for a few months in Pisa, where he worked as a secretary; and then moved to Florence, a centre of intellectual and artistic life of the time.

In 1812 his father died, and Kalvos's finances became deeply strained. However, during that year he also met Ugo Foscolo, the most honoured Italian poet and scholar of the era, and, like Calvos, a native of Zacynthos. Foscolo gave Calvos a post as his copyist, and put him to teaching a protégé of his. Under the influence of Foscolo Kalvos took up neoclassicism, archaizing ideals, and political liberalism. In 1813 Kalvos wrote three tragedies in Italian: Theramenes, Danaides and Hippias. He also completed four dramatic monologues, in the neoclassical style.

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