Who is george seferis

George Seferis. In a photograph. Categories : births deaths Nobel Prize Winners Poets. Navigation menu Personal tools Log in Request account. Namespaces Page Discussion. Views Read View source View history. Other Areas Phantis. This page was last edited on October 16, , at Privacy policy About Phantis Disclaimers Mobile view. When his family moved to Paris in , Seferis studied law at the University of Paris and became interested in literature.

This was the beginning of a long and successful diplomatic career, during which he held posts in England and Albania He continued to serve in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and held diplomatic posts in Ankara and London He was appointed minister to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq , and was Royal Greek Ambassador to the United Kingdom from to , the last post before his retirement in Athens.

Seferis and his family settled in Athens in to escape the devastation of World War I. After law studies in Paris, he joined the Greek foreign service. In he was appointed to the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He lived in Athens and served his post until , when he was appointed to the Greek Consulate in London. In he married Maria Zannou, who accompanied him to exile in Crete, Egypt, and later South Africa, where the Greek government was exiled. After numerous government positions, Seferis eventually retired as ambassador to England.

Influenced by the French symbolists, and later by T. Eliot and Ezra Pound , Seferis wrote most of his twelve books of poetry, essays, translations, diaries, and fiction while posted overseas. Strophe marked the advent of modernism in Greece.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in , the first Greek to be so honored. Seferis's verse is spare, hermetic, and characterized by a profound knowledge of Greek history and classical mythology and a deep understanding of Greece's past and its relevance to her present and future. For example, Gibbon considered that a thousand years of life were a decline.

How can a people be in decline for a thousand years? After all, between the Homeric poems and the birth of Christ eight hundred years elapsed—or something like that—and then presumably there were a thousand years of decline. I remember years ago when I was writing a thesis on what I thought were English influences in the poetry of Cavafy and Seferis, I asked you about certain images that crop up in your landscape, for example, the symbolic meaning of the statues that appear in your work.

They existed in a landscape I had seen. An illustration of that from someone who is a specialist in classical statues came the other day from an English scholar who was lecturing about the statuary of the Parthenon.

You once distinguished yourself from the average Englishman by suggesting that donkeys probably did for you what footballs and cars might do for them. I remember you also talked about the sea and the sailors of your native village near Smyrna. You know, the strange thing about imagery is that a great deal of it is subconscious, and sometimes it appears in a poem, and nobody knows wherefrom this emerged.

I think there are two different things functioning: conscious and subconscious memory. I think the way of poetry is to draw from the subconscious. I remember many things from my childhood which did impress me. And that strange instrument—I think I destroyed it in the end by examining and re-examining it, taking it apart and putting it back together and then taking it apart again—became something mythical for me.