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- Title
"And so to Athens": William Plomer in "The Land of Love".
- Authors
Georganta, Konstantina
- Abstract
William Plomer was a poet and novelist who grew up in South Africa, but found an outlet for his identity crisis in Greece of the 1930s where he went on to look for idealized Greek beauty, only to find it debased when impinged upon by individuals from "ostensibly more sophisticated levels of civilization." In his poems and short stories about Greece, Plomer combined homosexual themes and an ironical look at history's essential heroes and was in constant dialogue with Constantine P. Cavafy's poetics. In contrast to idealized imaginings of the country as the place of intellectual rebirth and uninhibited physical pleasure, Plomer's Greece was one of cultural plurality--images of Apollonian eternal beauty, folk songs inspired by the Greek War of Independence, and aesthetic poses celebrating homoeroticism mingled with the dreaded face of modernization blending with the ruins of ancient Greece.
- Subjects
GREECE; 20TH century British authors; PLOMER, William, 1903-1973; HOMOSEXUALITY in literature; 20TH century English literature; GREECE in literature; ENGLISH literature; LITERARY criticism; CLASSICAL civilization; INTELLECTUAL life; BIOGRAPHY (Literary form)
- Publication
Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 2010, Vol 28, Issue 1, p49
- ISSN
0738-1727
- Publication type
Article