Originally entitled Days of 1945–51, [the] portion of Seferis's voluminous diary [published as George Seferis: A Poet's Journal] was first made ready for publication in Greece in 1967 because, he said, its pages stood out "almost by themselves, among the many that we use to help our memory in various ways." Memory, which Seferis himself found inescapably painful, thus becomes the keynote of the book, woven like a dark thread binding together each of its dominant themes, yet paradoxically evoking and shaping his most moving poetic utterances. (p. 311)

[At] the end the great poet sums up, in a dramatic crescendo of feeling, what he meant by saying that these pages stood out by themselves among many such which the artist uses to help the memory "in various ways." One of those ways may be seen in the poetry itself, which for many years Seferis had fashioned out of the raw...