Mourning and grief for the loss of a person are expressed through poetry known—since ancient Greek times—as elegy, which serves as a verbal representation of emotion with the ultimate goal of comforting the involved audience. The maturation of the genre in the 20th century is linked to the two world wars that changed the way humans perceive the world around them, their relationship with others, with themselves, with existing ideologies, and ultimately with God. Modern poetry of mourning is an art of loss, an art at the center of which lies the anti-consolatory elegy, the anti-elegy. The dual function of elegiac poetry as both a private and public expression of mourning finds excellent expression in Greek post-war poetry, particularly in the poetry of Kiki Dimoula, which is dominated by death, emptiness, the sense that "time is running out," that the "curtain will soon fall," as the poet transcends the boundaries of historical truth, carving poetic paths of awareness of the ephemeral, transforming poetry into a literary act of self-awareness.