Although she wrote poetry from an early age, her most important poems were written during the last four years of her life, when, suffering from tuberculosis, she was secluded in an Athens Sanatorium, where she died in 1930.

She first appeared in the Literary world at age 14 with the prose poem “The Pain of the Mother”, which refers to the death of a sailor who was washed up on the shores of Filiatra and is influenced by the lamentations heard in Mani Peninsula.

She studied at the Kounallaki Drama School and even managed to appear as an actress in a play, "The Little Rag", for which she had the lead role.

Her poetry is a concise source of lyricism that breaks in deep sorrow and sometimes grief, with obvious influences from the love of her life, Kostas Karyotakis, but also laments from Mani.

To Polydouri, expression meant straight transcribing from the events occurring in her emotional world to the poetic language with all the idealizations and exaggerations her romantic nature dictated to her".

The first article about Maria Polydouri based on her archives and diary belongs to Vasiliki Bobou-Stamati and is published in Elliniki Dimiourgia (1954), p. 617-624.

The Collected Works of Maria Polydouri released for the first time in the 1960s by Estia Press, curated by Lili Zografou.

[3] Her poems have been set to music by Greek composers, classical artists and rock – including Menelaos Palladio, Kostis Kritsotakis, Nikos Mamangakis, Yiannis Spanos, Notis Mavroudis, George Arkomanis, Dimitris Papadimitriou, Michalis Koumbios, Stelios Botonakis and band "Plinthetes" and " Iliodromio "and the composer Nikos Fylaktos with voice and piano.

Collections: Her poems (or at least a part of them) have been translated to Bulgarian, Catalan, Dutch, German, French, Italian, Macedonian, Romanian, Spanish[5] and Swedish.