George Seferis Biography and List of Works

Greek poet, essayist, and diplomat who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963. Seferis is considered to be the most distinguished Greek poet of the pre-war generation. In his work Seferis combines the language of everyday speech with traditional poetic forms and rhythms. Seferis spent much of his life outside Greece in diplomatic service. A Recurrent theme in his poetry is exile and nostalgia for the Mediterranean and his birthplace, Smyrna.

"Your music is this life
you wasted.
You could regain it if you wish,
if you fasten to this indifferent thing
which casts you back
there where you set out."
(from Summer Solstice, 1966)

George Seferis (Georgios Seferiades) was born in Izmir (formerly Smyrna), Turkey. His father was a lawyer and his mother the daughter of a prosperous landowner. Smyrna, an ancient city on the Aegean Sea, is one of the cities claiming to be birthplace of Homer. It became a major source of inspiration for Seferis during his career as a poet. Seferis started to compose poems at the age of 14. In 1914 the family moved to Athens, where he graduated from the First Classical Gymnasium in 1917.

From 1918 Seferis reluctantly studied law at the Sorbonne in Paris, completing his doctoral requirements in 1924. During these years he continued to write verse and familiarized himself with contemporary French poetry. When the Turks retook Smyrna in the early 1920s, Seferis felt he was in exile and decided to enter the diplomatic service. He travelled to London to perfect his English.

Upon graduating he obtained a post in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He served in London as a vice-consul and as consul in Albania in the 1930s. In London he discovered the poetry of T.S. Eliot, whose style greatly influenced him. His first volume of poetry, STROFI (The Turning Point), appeared in 1931 in a private edition. In it Seferis turns his back on the dominating rhetorical tone and uses sophisticated rhymes and imagery. In The Turning Point Seferis shows his deep acquaintance with symbolism, as in his second collection, I STERNA (1932).

In the following collections Seferis leaves lyricism behind and assimilates what he had learned from Cavafy, Eliot, and Ezra Pound. In MYTHISTORIMA (1935) Seferis attained a style that greatly influenced the development of Greek verse, but he also bridged the gap between tradition and modern expression. Seferis uses the vernacular, the language spoken by literate Greeks, and combines his own experiences with history. Most of the characters are taken from Homer's Odyssey. Mythistorima's twenty-four sections are narrated by travellers who are at once present-day exiles and ancient, Homeric figures.

"We were searching to rediscover the first seed so that the ancient drama could begin again."
(from Mythistorima, 1935)

In 1941 Seferis married Maria Zannou, whom he had met on vacation in 1936. During WW II Seferis accompanied Greek government officials into exile, living in Crete, Egypt, South Africa, and Italy. After the war he held diplomatic posts in Lebanon (1953-57), Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, and served as the Greek ambassador in London from 1957 to 1962. "Wherever I travel, Greece wounds me." (1936) Seferis's first publication in English, The King of Assine and Other Poems, appeared in 1948. During the Cyprus crisis in the 1950s, he contributed to the negotiations that resulted in the London Agreement (1959), making Cyprus independent of British rule.

Seferis's years as a diplomat in several countries made him a modern Odysseus. The theme of the wandering was further developed in the persona of Stratis Thalassinos in three collections, Logbooks, written in Albania, South Africa and in Italy (1940-65). The last collection, Logbook 3, is dedicated to the people of Cyprus. Seferis retired from governmental service in 1962 and settled in Athens. In 1969 he declared his opposition to the Papadopoulos dictatorship after the military coup of 1967, and became popular with the younger generation in Greece. Seferis also expressed his fears about the triumph of commercial culture and once recalled his dream in which the Parthenon was auctioned off to become an advertisement, "every column a gigantic tube of toothpaste." Seferis died on September 20, 1971. Thousands of young people escorted his coffin, to honour him as a spokesman for freedom. His widow cut off her hair and flung it into his grave. "I am fully conscious that we do not live in a time when the poet can believe that fame awaits him, but in a time of oblivion. This doesn't make me less dedicated to my beliefs, I am more so."

For further reading: The Marble Threshing Floor by P. Sherrard (1956); Modern Greek Poetry by K. Friar (1973); Love and the Symbolic Journey in the Poetry of Cavafy, Eliot and Seferis by C. Capri-Karka (1982); My Brother George Seferis by J. Tsatsos (1982), Form,Cycle, Infinity: Landscape Imagery in the Poetry of Robert Frost and George Seferis by Rachel Hadas (1985); War in the Poetry of George Seferis by K. Kapre-Karka (1986); George Seferis by R. Beaton (1991) - Note: Seferis translated T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land into Greek and introduced also Ezra Pound to his countrymen. As Odysseus Elytis (Nobel Prize in 1970) he published poems in the 1930s in the literary review Ta Nea Grammata.

I STROFÍ, (1931)