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‘[…] 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
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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

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