The British Council and Anglo-Greek Literary Interactions, 1945–1955

‘This place is really the other end of the world’: ‘Am disappointed by the Greek intelligentsia whom I’d heard much of but perhaps we haven’t met the right cliques yet.’ 1 These comments in letters a few months into Louis MacNeice’s Athens secondment from the BBC to direct the British Institute in 1950 hardly breathe the Philhellenism which was such a feature of many - notably Rex Warner, or Kenneth Johnstone before that - who were part of that Athens setting; and they might suggest that a generally dyspeptic attitude to Greece prevailed on MacNeice’s part. 2 That, however, would be a simplification. In this chapter I aim to tease out some of the implications of MacNeice’s frustrations with the Institute and the Council, and by extension their Greek setting, in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. It may be that, without the pre-war or war-time experience of Greece possessed by some of his British colleagues, and without their conversance with the modern language, MacNeice found it harder to marry his classical background with the contemporary experience. (By contrast, Lawrence Durrell’s very lack of a classical background seems to have disinhibited his rapport with Greece.) That would account for some of the dialogue-of-the-deaf feeling to his reports of the cultural milieu and what he felt could be but a minor British contribution to it. It may be, too - as critics have argued - that the poet’s Athens stay coincided with, even was intended to compensate for, a dry period ‘in the middle way’ of his poetic career. 3 But it seems worth taking seriously the fact that he built his most architectonic book, Ten Burnt Offerings (1952), around a Greece formed, not just by a store of classical allusions, but by the Greece around him - about which he had some sharply, though covertly, political things to say. 4 Here I aim briefly to set the poems that emerged from this period in the context of, and in contact with, contemporary Greece and, above all, the poetry of George Seferis

Art · Literature · Political science · Balkan and Eastern European Studies · Balkans: History, Politics, Society · Classics · Contemporary and Historical Greek Studies · History · 18e siècle · 18th century · 19e siècle · 19th century · 20e siècle · 20th century · British Council · foreign relations · Great britain · Greece · Intellectual life · Modern History · Philosophy · Relations · Study and teaching

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