them on the dignified formation of the Panhellenic language". The adjudicator was Alexandros Rizos Rangavis, one of the most influential literary men of the time. Language policy at the time was very much at the service of the Megali Idea, the grand re-unification of the entire Greek nation. Some critics were less polite; an anonymous newspaper article (probably written by Soutsos) sharply told Tertsetis that it was inappropriate for Ionians, who possessed "a poor dialect", to impose it on "the language of the free Hellenes". Valaoritis' "national" poetry becomes respectable However, these attitudes were to be softened over the next two decades, notably by Aristotelis Valaoritis, Ionian poet and parliamentarian, whose work significantly advanced the acceptance of demotic as a language of poetry. During his early career in the Parliament of the United States of the Ionian Islands, Valaoritis had become famous for his passionately patriotic poems, written in vigorous demotic with dramatic dialogue and a style recalling Greek folk-song. But (in an 1857 foreword, just after the Soutsos controversy) he had also mounted a strong defence of the general use of "the language of the people" in poetry: "Born automatically, it is not the work of art, unlike the [Katharevousa] that is being devised at present... it is the sole remaining shoot on the venerable old tree of our nationality". When (after the unification of 1864) Valaoritis moved to Athens to take a seat in the national Greek Parliament, his high reputation went with him; and when in 1872 the University commissioned him to write a commemorative poem, it described his language as "sweetly spoken and entirely national". Although this referred only to its use in poetry, Athenian attitudes to demotic had now begun to change, particularly in the years after 1870. It was no longer just the 'debased grocers' slang' of a generation before. In the next year, 1873, the national poetry competition was won for the first time by a collection of poems in demotic—The Voice of My Heart by the young Dimitrios Kampouroglou. When it came to prose, however, even Valaoritis still used Katharevousa. Konemenos and The Question of the Language In 1873 (brought up in Lefkada and Corfu in the Islands) became one of the first to break with this convention when he published The Question of the Language in Corfu. Writing in fluent demotic prose, Konemenos presented what was in effect a demoticist manifesto,