Giorgos Seferis | Mythic History
Konstantinos Parthenis, 'Angel' (post-1940) If, for Yiannis Ritsos, the work of the poet should reflect his engagement with history, projecting a politicised image of the artist as a public persona seeking to interpret and furthermore cultivate a response to historical reality, the poetry of his contemporary Giorgos Seferis proposes a somewhat different viewpoint. And yet, paradoxically, for the poet whose fictional universe was populated by solitary figures; who, for two years, refrained from publicly denouncing the repressive regime of the dictators, it was one of his poems, “Denial”, set to music by Mikis Theorodakis, that epitomised for the Greek nation the struggle for freedom. Seferis’s funeral in 1971 turned into a mass demonstration and a lament for a life that, in the poet’s words, had begun “with such feeling, such force, with such desire and passion” and had gone bitterly wrong. Born in Smyrna – a prosperous, commercial city in Asia Minor with a thriving Greek