[2] From 1939 to 1945 he taught at the University of Athens and, in 1947, moved to Britain where he began teaching at Exeter College in Oxford as the Bywater and Sotheby professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek.
[2] In 1968 Trypanis relocated to Chicago, after acting as a visiting professor at various other American universities, where he taught Classical Literature until 1974.
Though his poetry has since fallen into obscurity, his writings received some critical acclaim in his time, with two of his collections, The Stones of Troy and The Cocks of Hades receiving, respectively, the choice of the Poetry Book Society and the Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature.
[1] His poetry was also acclaimed by the likes of Theodore Roethke, W. H. Auden and John Wain.
[1] His poetry was first published while he was living in England, and it was also while in England that he began to develop a poetic circle of his own; he wrote his poetry (at least that portion which was published) in English, his second language, which perhaps opens the door to comparisons to the likes of Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov, both of whom wrote in English, despite being native speakers of Polish and Russian, respectively.