Generally Greek poets of the period of irredentism were content, in the vein of Valaoritis, to lay claim rather to the spirit of the Homeric heroes than to the letter of the Homeric poems. But the Asia Minor Disaster was a buffet to this way of thinking, and the failure of heroism was a subject explored by a number of influential novels in the decades that followed. The particular relevance of the issue to this study is that much of the impetus to making the Aegean coast of Turkey part of the Greek state derived from the fact that it had been the home of illustrious ancient Greek cities and perhaps of Homer's own: as Nikolareïzis indicated in ‘The Presence of Homer in Modern Greek Poetry’, the loss of Asia Minor was bound to change attitudes to Homer. There is an illuminating parallel with poetry in English. The generation of the English ruling class that went to the Great War constituted perhaps the widest reading public for Homer in Greek that there had ever been; and following the War it was an American poet resident in England who showed his revulsion against the whole enterprise in terms which overturned Homer: