[The funeral of George Seferis] proved to be a more or less spontaneous public event, not to say political demonstration, of a kind normally reserved in Greece for the passing of popular prime ministers illegally out of office. The drama and symbolism of it—thousands of young people raising the victory sign at the poet's grave, shouting "immortal", "freedom", "elections", and singing an early Seferis lyric … would surely have surprised the poet himself even more than it may have surprised his readers in England and America. Less than three years before his death …, Seferis declared, in one of the few interviews he allowed to appear in print:

I am sorry to say that I never felt I was the. spokesman for anything or anybody…. I've never felt the obligation…. Others think they are the voices of the country. All right. God bless them….

When Seferis published a volume of poems dedicated to the people of Cyprus in 1955—his first volume since the death of Sikelianos—critics in Greece, quick to dress him in the mantle of national poet, either celebrated the publication as an eloquent defence of Greek interests in the Cyprus dispute or criticised the poet for beginning to write what was understood to be propaganda in verse form. The new volume was, in fact, typical of the kind of poetry that Seferis had been writing since the middle 1930s and especially during World War II, "political" poetry only in the broadest sense of the term: a persona brooding over the "new idiocies of men/or of the gods" that had brought on renewed suffering, fearful always that he is "fated to hear newsbearers coming to tell him" that the latest war is "all for an empty tunic, all for a Helen" (as he puts it in his 1955 poem alluding to Euripides' heroine). The persona of the Cyprus volume is much the same as that of "The Last Stop", written ten years earlier, at the end of World War II, just as the poet was returning to Greece from Italy after his long service with the Greek Government-in-exile…. (p. 37)

What the critics of the Cyprus volume failed to recognise was that the poet had succeeded in transcending propaganda—and anything approaching it—by taking the same large view, by giving expression to the same mythologising sensibility that had characterised his vision of the contemporary predicament (including that of his own nation) since Mythistorima, the 1935 volume of mythologised history that had established his as the most important new voice in Greek letters. It was understandable that the narrow response to the Cyprus volume might irritate the poet enough to make him dismiss any sort of public role for the kind of poet he chose to be. At the same time Seferis remained Greek through to his bones. [He] continued to be a "national" poet in his capacity for dramatising personal preoccupations in those terms that help to define the enduring qualities of his nation, for example, its landscape, its legends, its demotic traditions in literature. (pp. 37-8)

Seferis's irritation regarding the public role he was supposed to play became acute after the Nobel Prize award of 1963 moved him on to an international stage. He was now not only poet laureate, but the first Greek Nobel laureate of any kind, with a fame that quickly spread far beyond national boundaries. And if those of his countrymen who never read poetry sometimes confused him with a Greek soccer star of similar name and renown, many of those who knew better began to look to him for the sort of prophetic leadership that nobody else was providing…. But whatever Seferis's private sentiments, he remained adamant at first about avoiding public pronouncements. (p. 38)

If the official attitude towards Seferis in the months following his statement [against the régime, March, 1969,] was essentially one of pretending that he was too senile to be taken seriously, the attitude of intellectual circles in Athens, from students to fellow writers, was one of homage that soon approached adoration. "The Poet" became "Our Poet." It was not merely that Seferis had finally acceded with full heart to his expected role of laureate-spokesman, but as the first independent man of mind with the courage to speak out on an international stage against the régime and the drift of its ambitions, he served to free others with less opportunity for courage and a smaller platform. The immediate result of his influence was the coming together of a group of writers, with disparate political affiliations but a common distaste for the Junta, a rather motley but nevertheless committed intellectual underground that produced a strong anti-régime statement supporting Seferis's position, and, eventually, a volume of anti-régime stories, poems, and essays entitled Eighteen Texts, with the lead contribution Seferis's latest poem, "The Cats of St. Nicholas."…

[An effect of the volume was] to put Seferis at the centre of opposition to the régime's control over the intellectual life of the country, to make him gradually the unacknowledged leader of dispossessed students and the silent voice of those with no public outlet for their own brooding sense of injustice—until the feeling he had engendered found an ultimate release in the surprises of his funeral. (p. 40)

A writer like Seferis may suffer in a minority language many disadvantages in his lifetime, but, if he is a great writer, as Seferis was, surely he puts the rest of the world at a disadvantage until it learns that language. Meanwhile, we must do what we can with the devices of translation and literary gossip. It is worth noticing that the harmonious rumble of his prose is almost as difficult to reproduce in English as his poetry.