Giorgos Seferis | Mythic History (Part I)
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, one that derives from a fictional (and mythical) universe populated by solitary figures. Paradoxically, it was one of the latter's 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 againsts the repressive regime of the dictators 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 population – in 1900, t