Scion of a distinguished Phanariot family, Alexandros Soutsos was born in Istanbul (Constantinople) in 1803. He was a nephew of the poet Iakōvakīs Rizos Neroulos, cousin of the Alexandros Rizos Rangavis and elder brother of the writer and publicist Panagiōtīs Soutsos. Along with Rangavīs and his brother Panagiōtīs, Soutsos introduced Romanticism to modern Greek literature.

Soutsos’ course of life was to some extent identical to that of his brother Panagiōtīs: having received private education, they were sent to study at the Greek school of the island of Chios in 1816 (or 1818). When their father died in 1820, the Soutsos brothers became protégés of their uncle, who was then hospodar (governor) of Wallachia. After a stint in Bucharest they were sent to Paris with a letter of introduction to Adamantios Koraīs; here they absorbed Saint-Simonian liberalism, cultural Romanticism (Lamartine, Béranger), and, inevitably, revolutionary nationalism. The killing of their elder brother Dimitrios in the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence (1821) sent Soutsos into a depression which the brothers sought to alleviate by moving to Italy. Here, he composed five verse tragedies on historical themes within a period of three years.

In 1825 the brothers tried briefly and without much success to join the War of Independence. In 1827, they headed back to Paris, where Soutsos resumed his studies at the Sorbonne for the next two years (1827-29). Besides publishing, under the watchful eye of the French police, Philhellenic-Patriotic pamphlets, he wrote an Histoire de la Révolution grecque which appeared with a Parisian publisher in 1829. Around early 1830, the brothers joined their relatives in Nauplion, then Greece’s capital, where Soutsos published his comedy Ο Άσωτος (“The prodigal”), castigating the artificial Westernized manners of Naupliote socialites. A warm supporter of constitutional liberalism, Soutsos was soon disenchanted with the authoritarian rule of Kapodistrias; satires published in the daily press or circulated as pamphlets (in the style of Béranger) caused him to be exiled to the island of Hydra (1831). The experience was turned into a novel, Ο Εξόριστος του 1831 (“A man exiled in 1831”), an anti-authoritarian indictment wrapped in a romantic love story, published, not without difficulty, in 1835; it became the first modern Greek novel to be translated into a foreign language (German, 1837).

Soutsos now placed his hopes for the moral and political regeneration of independent Greece in Otto, the new Bavarian-born king, and gathered all his published poetry in a collection (1833) under the title Πανόραμα της Ελλάδος (“Panorama of Greece”). The new regime appointed him to various official positions (member of the committee on education, 1833; lecturer at the University of Athens, 1837), from which he subsequently resigned as relationships with the king (whose absolutism fell short of Soutsos’s liberal ideals) turned sour. He attacked the regime through newspaper articles, pamphlets, theatrical plays, and satires. Influenced by Byron’s Childe Harold, he wrote his own Περιπλανώμενος (“The wanderer”) in 1839. The police confiscated all copies at the printing house due to the work’s virulent anti-Bavarianism; the author was imprisoned, put on trial, and finally acquitted one year later in 1840. A fresh edition of the work in the 1850s led to a new confiscation and imprisonment; this time Soutsos was given a five-year prison sentence and was released only after he had obtained a royal pardon.

Soutsos’s poetry took a decisive turn in 1845 with his Ποιητικόν Χαρτοφυλάκιον (“Poetical portfolio”). As he became more preoccupied with national unity and identity, he abandoned satire for epic and lyrical forms and leaned increasingly to archaic language and style. In his Τουρκομάχος Ελλάς (“Turk-battling Greece”, 1850), the poet sought inspiration not only in classical and Byzantine glory, but also in the contemporary heroism of the Greek War of Independence; in his later Απομνημονεύματα ποιητικά επί του ανατολικού πολέμου (“Poetical memoirs of the Eastern War”, 1857), he saw in the Crimean War the chance for Greeks to fulfil their collective destiny and national mission.

Soutsos’s work was controversial: younger readers admired and the establishment disliked his caustic satire and his oppositional stance. It was also influential: Soutsos has been called “the father of modern Greek literature” owing to his pioneering transfer of Byronic Romanticism into Greece. Yet the experience of state persecution, a sense of missionary Patriotism, his appetite for learning, and possibly his sexual orientation turned him into a constant, rootless, and rather frustrated wanderer within and outside Greece. He died alone in Smyrna in 1863.