Welcome

Pietros Maneos was born in 1979 in the Philadelphia area to a Greek father and an Italian mother. His Grecian side hails from the very village of Sappho – Mytilene, Lesbos – while his Italian side is descended from Magna Grecia, specifically Fragneto Monforte, a town just outside of Napoli. Pietros attended the prestigious preparatory schools, The Haverford School and Northfield Mount Hermon where he occupied himself with his studies and his athletic pursuits.

After finishing his post-graduate year at Northfield Mount Hermon, Maneos matriculated to The University of Miami where he majored in English Literature and minored in Classical Antiquity, a new program at the time. During his sophomore year he took a semester off to travel throughout Italy, a trip that fired his poetic imagination. ‘Without a doubt, it was Italy, and the city of Rome, that nourished my poetic sensibility,’ he notes. Upon his return to America, Maneos received word that his poetry had so impressed an entrepreneurial Roman who was just in the midst of forming a publishing company, that he wished to publish Maneos’ collection, titled – The Soul of A Young Man. Maneos triumphantly returned to Rome in order to finalize the publication. In December of 2001, at the tender age of 21, after just receiving the first copy of his collection, he exclaimed to a friend, ‘My delusions of Grandeur are steadily becoming a reality of Grandeur.’

Mr. Maneos then went on to lecture to the Boas Poetry Society in Miami as well as host a successful book-signing event at Books & Books located in Coral Gables. His initial excitement soon subsided however as his publisher was forced to return to his native Philippines due to pressing familial and business matters. Without the guidance and support of his publisher, Maneos soon grew disillusioned with the commercial aspect of Literature, and in a fit of Byronic despair, he renounced the very act of publication. ‘I will never publish commercially again, as Zeus is my witness,’ he vowed.

Pietros obediently adhered to his renunciation until 2005 when he was involved in a torrid love-affair with a betrothed Brasilian beauty. His furious compositions consumed him during the Spring and Summer of 2005, finally finishing in August of 2005. He planned to present the collection – Poems of Blood and Passion – as a present to his now estranged nymph on her birthday in the early part of September. ‘I did not have the requisite time to play the dreaded publishing game of sending the collection to a literary mandarin, awaiting upon their approbation or disapprobation of the work, so I opted for self-publishing, an act that will perhaps permanently scar my Literary Legacy, but so be it, as it was done out of the exigency of Love, and any act performed from Love should surely be forgiven.’

Besides composing impassioned verse during this period, Maneos was also engrossed in the creation of his Satirical Poem, American Bards & The London Reviewer, a work expressing his estrangement from the prevailing tenets of Minimalism, Nihilism, and Anti-Aestheticsm and the like in Modernity. ‘The work is really a dithyrambic cri de coeur for Beauty, Passion, and Emotion upon the Modern stage more than a proper Satire, and should it ever be published it will undoubtedly make me the most despised personage in Modern American letters, excepting Camille Paglia, of course. I stand defiantly and stridently against The Idols of the barbarous Age. Specifically, the work lampoons T.S. Eliot, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, and Frank O’Hara.’

Though the work has not yet been formally published, it has attracted much attention, with the world-renowned Artist, Tomasz Rut, painting Maneos in the classical manner in a work titled ‘To Kalon’ – ‘The Beautiful; in classical Greek. ‘Tomasz and I collaborated on the concept for the painting, which was an exhilarating process, to say the least, since not only is a Tomasz an Artistic Genius, but also since many of the themes within the painting are drawn directly from my Satire. Here one should think of the historical collaboration between Delacroix and Byron, Severn and Keats, Tischbein and Goethe, and various other Poets and Painters inspired by one another throughout the Ages.’

In addition to constantly refining his Satire, Mr. Maneos is also finishing a short collection of lyric poems titled, The Resurrection of Orpheus. He spends his mornings and early afternoons in disciplined devotion to The Logos (The Word) and to To Kalon (The Beautiful), while in the evenings he amuses himself in the Gymnasia, weight-training and boxing. He is also active in the resistance movement in Cyprus against the Turks, and dreams of one day dying a beautiful death in Nicosia, Cyprus in the manner of the Homeric Heroes that he so reveres.