The Sea as Medium for Artistic Experience

Zusammenfassung

The sea has been the element that has inspired poets to venture with their thoughts from the known in search of the unknown. In this yearning for new horizons and experiences, the creative powers of poets have generated an unending sequence of descriptive and metaphorical statements of personal intellectual journeys.¹ In the following, I will investigate some modern poets’ desire to search for insight and experience regarding themselves and the world in which they live. The sea will serve as the central metaphor for the poets’ statements. I have chosen four poets whom I will consider representative of this search. They are Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Constantine P. Cavafy, and George Seferis. While the first two poets wrote their major works less than twenty years apart — they are nearly contemporaries — the third wrote about fifty years after Baudelaire, and Seferis, the fourth, nearly eighty years after Baudelaire. I am dealing roughly with four generations of poets.