There are two types of literary anniversaries: commemorative and substantive. With the former, we remember people who, through their work, offered literary emotion in their time. With the latter, we are given the opportunity to discover a significant meaning for our time in a work that has ceased to interest us (more or less), or to affirm the value of a work that we did not feel diminished after the death of its author.

One hundred years after the birth of George Seferis and almost thirty after his death, the importance of Seferis' work remains intact. Cosmopolitan yet distinctly Greek, Seferis provides us with that lesson of aesthetic and moral balance between avant-garde and tradition, citizenship and cosmopolitanism, individual desire and participation in the collective, without which a person may remain a sad burden or become a feather in the wind.

But primarily, Seferis, with the unyielding power of his poetry, affirms his place among the great modern Greek poets. This book records the first, essentially, event of the Seferis Year: the tribute of the "New Epochs" of Vima on February 27, 2000. It gathers texts from Greek and foreign representatives of three different literary generations, which demonstrate that Seferis' work continues to provoke fruitful discussions that affirm its relevance and reach.