Love Quote by Giorgos Seferis

Seferis is quietly rejecting the whole geopolitical premise that culture needs acreage to matter. Coming from a Greek poet whose life was shaped by displacement, borders, and the uneasy status of a “small” nation in the shadow of empires, the line reads like a refusal to let power set the terms of artistic value. “Large” and “small” aren’t neutral descriptors here; they’re the vocabulary of diplomats, generals, and statisticians. Seferis swaps that scale for a different map entirely: the “domain” of poetry is not territory but interiority.

The craft of the sentence does the persuading. The first clause is deliberately absolute, almost legalistic: “there exists neither.” It’s a clean erasure of hierarchy. Then he pivots to something intimate and democratic at once, “the heart of all men,” a phrase that risks sentimentality but is saved by its polemical edge. In the mid-20th century, when nations were being carved up, renamed, occupied, and “managed,” insisting on the heart is a political move disguised as tenderness.

Subtext: poetry is a form of sovereignty that can’t be annexed. A country can be invaded; a language can be pressured; a poet can be censored. But the real audience is human attention itself, and that remains stubbornly borderless. Seferis isn’t naïve about politics; he’s sidestepping it, reminding you that the only empire a poem needs is the one it builds inside a reader.