ABSTRACT
The greek poet laureate George Seferis and the American expatriate writer Henry Miller met in Greece in 1939 during Miller’s first and only journey to the country shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. The prioritization of Hellas over modern Greece in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century European travelogues bears the marks of the discourses of academic and Romantic Hellenism that posited Hellas as the fountainhead of European civilization. Roessel observes that Miller and Durrell encountered Greece “with less literary baggage about the country than most of their contemporaries”, echoing Seferis’s comment that Miller visited Greece without any systematic classical preparation. In the Colossus, the image of a female modern Greece fit for the temple of Apollo invented by the Romantics is replaced by a modernist image of a male Greece in a state of Dionysian frenzy.
