Summary
Mason reviews GEORGE SEFERIS: Waiting for the Angel by Roderick Beaton.
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Extract
Close to Seferis
Close to Seferis
In essence the poet has one theme: his live body.-George Seferis, A Poet's Journal, trans. by Athan AnagnostopoulosTHE FIRST GREEK TO WIN THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE, George Seferis is still not as well understood or highly regarded as he deserves to be. He was quietly heroic in both art and life, a modern literary Odysseus, a poet of nostos spilling into nostalgia, but never sentimental. His wounds, both personal and public, made him a kind of representative man in the way Emerson said all poets are. A rigorous and innovative writer, Seferis was also a servant of reason in turbulent times, often abused for his refusal to betray his principles. Among English readers he is usually compared to T. S. Eliot, but this comparison is wide of the mark. Seferis was a poet of greater sensuality and worldly experience than Eliot, and one finds no trace in his poems of the antiSemitism that marred the American's work.The only reason Seferis is not as widely known and studied as Eliot is that he wrote in Greek, a language spoken by some fifteen million people globally, not all of whom, it is safe to say, read poetry. Many Greek speakers, however, have sung Seferis. Seve...See the full content of this document
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