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tion of selected poems by Seferis in our anthology Six Poets of Modern
Greece.
In the decade of the 1960s, the correspondence becomes weightier,
and it is shaped by a series of events that inspired more frequent
exchange. Among these are Seferis’s receiving the Nobel Prize in
1963, the volume of his collected poems in English translation that
Sherrard and I began to work on in 1964, Seferis’s trip to the United
States to receive an honorary doctorate from Princeton University
in 1965, the political situation in Greece and the advent of censorship
under the Colonels’ dictatorship immediately following the
coup of April 1967, Seferis’s residence at the Institute for Advanced
Study in Princeton in 1968 and his inner debate over becoming the
conscience of his country, and, finally, the preparation during 1969
of a comprehensive interview for the Paris Review series. 11
The correspondence in the early 1970s is perhaps the most casual
and in some ways the most personal. It includes Seferis’s urgent
requests for pipe tobacco and books (one of these relating to
his growing infirmity), a curious yet revealing exchange about a
misunderstanding involving our mutual friend the critic Zissimos
Lorenzatos, and a moving letter from Maro Seferis following her
husband’s death. My remarks will now focus specifically on the
letters that are gathered here, and the commentary will be arranged
chronologically and in keeping with the themes and preoccupations
that I have just outlined.
1951–1952
In 1951 I was a twenty-three-year-old graduate student who had
enrolled at Oxford to specialize in English literature but had begun
instead to take my first awkward steps into what was for me
the totally new field of Modern Greek literature, steps that eventually
carried me through a D. Phil. dissertation on Anglo-American
influences in the poetry of Cavafy and Seferis. It was Constantine
Trypanis, then the Bywater and Sotheby Professor of Byzantine
and Modern Greek at Oxford, and George Savidis, then a student
11 My interview with Seferis, recorded in his apartment at the Institute for Advanced Study,
was first published in the Fall 1970 issue of the Paris Review, reissued in their Writers at Work,
Fourth Series, edited by George Plimpton (New York: Viking Press, 1976), and included as a
“Postscript” to my collection of essays, Modern Greek Poetry: Voice and Myth (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1983).
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