I would certainly prefer to drink a better, I do not know what disgusting medicine than to condemn myself to reading Dante's Purgatory, or Byron's tragedies, or some of Shakespeare's tragedies, or other famous poets' worthless works. Lamartine, Hugo, Musset, Montes, Leopards, Parinis, Alfieri, Mantzoni, Pratis, are all that they wrote really rubbish?" Valaoritis wrote to Roidis on November 3, 1877. And below, in the same letter, he continued: "I don't give two pages of Diakou, one of Astrapogiannou, a few stanzas of "Vagia", "Samouel", "The Escape of Ali Pasha", instead of all the songs of Frosyni".

These private judgments of the poet, however exaggerated or debatable, strengthen us, after a century, while the basic demand for a philological edition of his Complete Works is pending, to attempt a selection within his literary work. A useful selection, made with philological responsibility, but with criteria that are more aesthetic and subjective than grammatical and "objective", in order to distinguish the "pure rubbish" or simply the steel from the inevitable rust, to set aside the youthful murmurs and make the poet's mature voice heard more clearly, to extract from his topical compositions the still viable body of his poetry.

Our selection, therefore, begins with the "Funeral Ode" (1852) and ends with "Foteinos" (1879), following, as far as possible, an absolute chronological order within the two main categories: poetic and prose texts. In the poetic texts, we systematically avoided the presentation of arbitrary excerpts, with two exceptions (the "Nanarism" and Lady Frosyni), in which, however, we also took care to present complete units.[...] 

We left in their original position the brief introductory prose texts that Valaoritis proposed in the poems of the Memorials as well as in some later ones. On the contrary, after many hesitations and discussions, we strengthened the meager unity of the "Prose" with the introductions of the Memorials, Lady Frosyni, and Athanasios Diakos, which, together with the Response to Dimitrios Vernardakis, constitute a kind of Poetry. Finally, as an epilogue, we included the Criticism of Vernardakis, so that the reader can judge for himself the historical controversy. Our text is based primarily on the first publications or editions, as well as, where possible, on the poet's manuscripts, which are preserved in the Valaoritis Archive. 

Of course, for the texts published after 1879, we relied primarily on the surviving manuscripts. The spelling was synchronized, the punctuation was discreetly enriched, the capitalization at the beginning of the verses was abolished, and in the dialogical parts of Athanasios Diakos and Foteinos, we added the names of the speakers following the model of Lady Frosyni.