Asphodels and Aspalathoi—Seferis, Heaney, Mahon: Politics and Landscape

Abstract

This chapter compares Mahon’s and Heaney’s quotes from George Seferis (Mahon’s epigraphs from Mythistorema in the 1970s: Ecclesiastes, “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford”; Heaney’s quotes from Seferis’s journal, his “Homage to Seferis” and “To George Seferis in the Underworld” in 1990s–2006) with source texts. Mahon’s quasi-mythical imagery of exile and victims of history, reflecting Seferis’s rendition of the 1922 Asia Minor Catastrophe in Mythistorema, is contrasted with Heaney’s combatant attitude in “To George Seferis…” enacting language’s and nature’s redress inspired by Seferis’s last word spelling the doom of the Greek junta. The focus of Heaney’s prose devoted to Seferis is the poet’s public role in extremis contingent to his reflections on Yeats, with whom Seferis also felt an affinity.