A modern poet reads ancient war texts: politics, life and death in George Seferis’ ‘The Last Day’*
It has been argued that ‘The Last Day’, written during the Metaxas dictatorship and while the Second World War was looming on the horizon, constitutes Seferis’ answer to the exhausted model of the ‘national poet’. The aim of this article is to examine in detail the poem’s allusions to ancient war texts, in order to deal with what stood at the heart of this answer, namely the key concept of the ‘historical poet’. Of prime importance will be issues of language and gender raised by the poem, as well as the historical context of its writing and reception.
Radical Postmodernist Literature

 This paper explores how classical antiquity was dealt with by Greek radical postmodernism of the late twentieth century. It focuses on the work of the renowned writer Nanos Valaoritis, whose short story A Classical Education (1990) ironically and playfully summarizes the disenchantment, confusion, sense of inadequacy and need for transcending antiquity. The following issues are studied: a) postmodernist visualization of antiquity; b) the ‘situational’ classicism activated by aesthetic conversion (détournement) of the ‘classics’; c) anti-modernism as a critique of Greek modernists. The term ‘ “equarrent” classicism’, coined by Valaoritis, is introduced as a process of ‘paralogical’ conditioning of the classics by post-colonial contemporaneity.
The Shade of Homer: A Study in Modern Greek Poetry
Introduction: Homer and the modern Greek poets Part I. Homer in the New Greece: The Spirit and the Letter: 1. Kalvos and Solomos 2. Archaism and kleftism 3. Palamas Part II. Sikelianos: 4. The Homeric inheritance 5. Greek romanticism comes of age 6. Beyond Homer Part III. Cavafy: 7. Modes of misquotation 8. Ancient days 9. Homer into history Part IV. Seferis: 10. Scholia 11. Ulysses/Disseas 12. Homer and the poetic vocation 13. Beyond the folk tradition 14. Spirit and letter in 'The King of Asine' Reflections Further reading References Index.