The Landscape as Body and the Body as Landscape: A Hermeneutic Examination of the Poetry of G. Seferis

This chapter focuses on the intersection between the embodied human perception of the landscape and the human body regarded as a landscape in poetry. It concentrates on the poetry of the Greek modernist George Seferis (1900–1971), a major figure in shaping the twentieth-century Greek poetry whose works are widely translated into English. His case is of particular interest; even though he follows the modernist trope of referring to Greece through its mythical past and of treating the landscape as an extension of an imaginary one; his poetry contains strong references to modern Greece, such as toponyms or almost photographical literary depictions of the landscape at his time. The interplay between the physical and the imaginary landscape in Seferis’s poetry is further very reliant on the senses, and particularly the sense of touch. The experience of the materiality of space in Seferis’ poetry, in turn, allows for a hermeneutic analysis of his poetry through the theories of embodied cognition, as well as phenomenology, especially as expressed in Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merlau-Ponty. Through this analysis, the cognitive effort to perceive the environment as well as one’s self appears to be difficult, attesting to a wounding interaction between the space and the body. On the one hand, this is because Seferis’s poetic personas do not perceive the physical landscape as void of intentionality. Parts of the landscape often come alive, much like limbs, and interact with the poetic persona’s body in a hurtful way. On the other hand, the intense interplay between the body and the physical environment is indicative of the cognitive difficulty of the poetic personas to distinguish their physical boundaries against the landscape. Ultimately, this chapter presents this interaction as a creative one and foregrounds the bodily wound as a metaphorical topos of effective meaning.