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waves, a land of the living blessed. But at the same time the poet
lets us know that this land — so small, so poor, so ancient — is
scarred by a tragic history and a persistent contemporary sorrow,
and its beautiful islands seem always just beyond the homesick
voyager’s reach. Perhaps the most famous line in Seferis’s poetry,
heard again and again in Athenian literary circles, is the one that
opens a poem with the self-mocking title “In the Manner of G. S.”:
“Wherever I travel Greece wounds me.” 4 The wounding is that of
a bittersweet nostalgia, of a longing to return to the light by a
contemporary Odyssean soul already too familiar with the darkness
of the asphodel plain.
Seferis’s effort to perfect his prose style also took some years, and
the source of his major inspiration in this mode was a seemingly
curious one. In his Nobel lecture, the poet tells us that “no other
man has taught me more how to write prose” than one General
Ioannis Makriyannis, who learned to write in his fashion after the
age of thirty-five in order to record his experience of the Greek
War of Independence and its aftermath in a mid-nineteenth century
document without punctuation that, in Seferis’s view, “resembles
a wall built stone by stone; all his words perform their function
and have their roots; sometimes there is something Homeric in
their movement.” That wall is invoked again in a lecture on
Makriyannis that Seferis delivered in Alexandria, Egypt, during
the Second World War, where he concludes that this writer’s “finished
building” left “the imprint of the adventures of an uninterrupted
human action . . . to which we give the name of style or rhythm.”
Makriyannis’ model inspired Seferis to write honestly, clearly, in
a personal style and rhythm that were able to forward an immense
sensitivity yet without the “false pretenses of rhetoric” that his predecessor
had also rejected, so that some think Seferis’s contribution
to Greek prose as great as that to Greek poetry. But equally
important, the Makriyannis Memoirs 5 also inspired the particular
vision of the Greek spirit that Seferis carried with him as both poet
and diplomat. In his Alexandria lecture, he tells us that “the content
of Makriyannis’ writing is the unending and tragic struggle of
a man who, deeply rooted in the instincts of his race, is striving for
4 In George Seferis: Collected Poems, p. 52.
5 The English translation by H. A. Lidderdale has the title Makriyannis: The Memoirs of
General Makriyannis (London: Oxford University Press, 1966).
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