You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
“Thrush” is the longest and, possibly, the most significant poem of George Seferis, the Greek poet and diplomat (Nobel Prize 1963).* The poem is of particular value to the psychoanalytic exploration of the creative process as we have rich biographical and autobiographical material pertaining to the poet's life experiences in general and to events closely related to the writing of the poem in particular. The poet's diaries, the dreams he reported at the time, and the dense symbolism of the poem contain elements of a profound personal crisis, while the dénouement of the poem carries with it the resolution of the crisis.
Seferis wrote the poem within two weeks in October 1946, but exercises and full verses are found in his diary several months before the actual writing. The fall of 1946 marked a turning point in Seferis' life, the end of a long period of stagnation and self-doubt and the restoration of the poet's creative thrust. Several years of private anguish and search for a personal space left him with a profound sense of despair and disgust. The war years spent in “bitter exile” (Egypt and South Africa) were followed by the return to Greece, a homeland devastated by the war and seething with violent political passions. These passions, which culminated in a short but fierce civil war in December of 1944, left the poet with deep psychic scars. In the spring of 1945 he wrote:
I can't remember another year as bad as this last one; nothing as horrible as the last two months … all these
* For the poems, we are using Keeley's excellent translation to English; for all other texts we translate directly from Greek.
Page 129days nothing but a lamentable monotony and a barbaric obsession for destruction (, p.11).
From a vast cultural heritage which he has used with mastery in his work, Seferis chose as the central idea to the poem the concept of “nekya,” the ritual offering of sacrifice to the dead souls for their counsel. “Thrush” is the poet's personal descent into Hades and the searc