Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T15:37:18.808Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘[…] all poetry is difficult […]’: the limitations of Seferis’ modernist poetics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Yannis Karavidas
Yannis Karavidas*
Affiliation:
Goldsmiths’ College, London
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In Greece, as in several other countries in the period between the two World Wars, one of the serious charges frequently made against Modernism was that it was impossibly bad mannered towards the reader — that it made no effort at all to communicate and that modernist poetry was ‘difficult’ or ‘obscure’. For example, as early as 1931, Kostis Palamas — the poet who had had an enormous impact on Greek literary affairs in the first half of this century — in a charming if not somewhat condescending letter addressed to George Seferis, noted that the poems of Στρoφή were ‘cryptographic’ and stated that he was personally unable to find the ‘key’ that was needed for deciphering such difficult poetry (Palamas 1931). A few years earlier, Seferis himself had noted in his journals that whenever he tried to read Valéry ‘s poems to Palamas and his circle, they had reacted by saying that they did not have time to solve ‘puzzles’ (1975: 62).

Type
Research Article
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 11 , 1987 , pp. 93 - 113
Copyright
Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 1987

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Baldick, Chris (1983). The Social Mission of English Criticism 1848-1932 (Oxford).Google Scholar
Dimiroulis, Dimitris (1985). ‘The Humble Art and the Exquisite Rhetoric: Tropes in the Manner of George Seferis’, in The Text and its Margins: Post-Structuralist Approaches to Twentieth-Century Greek Literature, eds. Margaret Alexiou and Vassilis Lambropoulos (New York) 59–84.Google Scholar
Eagleton, Terry (1978). Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London).Google Scholar
Eagleton, Terry (1980). ‘Three Questions on the Study of Literature’, The English Magazine 4, 8–10.Google Scholar
Eagleton, Terry (1983). Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford).Google Scholar
Easthope, Antony (1983). Poetry as Discourse (London).Google Scholar
Eliot, T.S. (1975). Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode (London).Google Scholar
Eliot, T.S. (1980). The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England (London).Google Scholar
Elytis, Odysseus (1938). 4: 6-7, 581–4.Google Scholar
Elytis, Odysseus (1974). (Athens).Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel (1981). ‘The Order of Discourse’, in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young (London) 48–78.Google Scholar
Furbank, P.N. and Kettle, , Arnold, (1977). Modernism and its Origins (Milton Keynes).Google Scholar
Karavidas, Yannis (1983). The Springboard and the Athlete: Surrealism in Greece 1924-1945 (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Essex).Google Scholar
Karavidas, Yannis (1986). 72, 33–8.Google Scholar
Kermode, Frank (1976). Romantic Image (London).Google Scholar
Martin, Graham (1977). T.S. Eliot: Criticism (Milton Keynes).Google Scholar
Nakas, Thanassis (1978). (Athens).Google Scholar
Palamas, Kostis (1931). 10, 996–7.Google Scholar
Seferis, George (1974a). vol. 1 (Athens).Google Scholar
Seferis, George (1974b). vol. 2 (Athens).Google Scholar
Seferis, George (1975). (Athens).Google Scholar
Seferis, George (1982). Collected Poems, trs. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (London).Google Scholar
Solomos, Dionysios (1971). vol. 1, ed. Linos Politis (Athens).Google Scholar
Tziovas, Dimitris (1985). ‘The Organic Discourse of Nationistic Demoticism: A Tropological Approach’, in The Text and its Margins: Post-Structuralist Approaches to Twentieth-Century Greek Literature, eds. Margaret Alexiou and Vassilis Lambropoulos (New York) 253–77.Google Scholar
Vayenas, Nassos (1979). (Athens).Google Scholar
Watson, George (1963). The Literary Critics: A Study of English Descriptive Criticism (Harmondsworth).Google Scholar
Williams, Raymond (1983). Writing in Society (London).Google Scholar
Williams, Raymond (1985). The Country and the City (London).Google Scholar