The Burden of the Past, the Anxiety of Influence: however we term it, the subject of the poet's relation to his predecessors is one that the late twentieth century finds compelling; and the reader of this book will no doubt be hoping to learn something more about this phenomenon. It has after all been acknowledged that 'everyone who now reads and writes in the West, of whatever racial background, sex or ideological camp, is still a son or daughter of Homer.' What is the importance of Homer for the poets of modern Greece? Is he a helper, a kindly ancestral shade who speaks to them across the ages, or a handicap, a shadow that will loom over their efforts for ever?

Eliot's remark above is an important sign that in the poetry of modern Greece there may be something from which the West as a whole can learn. Not that the remark was made in that spirit: it is in the context of a campaign against the complacency of English critics with respect to the place of ‘tradition’ in English life and letters that Eliot chooses the modern Greek case as uncontroversially incompatible with established notions of tradition as continuity. Mentioning the modern Greek and Aeschylus – chosen above Homer here, it seems, to make a closer parallel with Shakespeare – is to take the modern Englishman down a peg or two.