Odysseas Elytis

Odysseas Elytis was born Odysseas Alepoudelis in Heraklion, Crete, in 1911, the youngest of six children of a family from Lesbos that had built a soap and olive-oil business; in 1914 they moved to Athens. He studied law without taking a degree, drawn instead to painting and to the French surrealists, especially Paul Éluard. Encouraged by George Seferis and befriended by the poet Andreas Embirikos, he published his first poems in the review Nea Grammata in 1935 under the name Elytis, and his first book, Orientations, in 1939.

His early work is a luminous, sensuous poetry of island summers, wind and young bodies, using surrealist freedom for affirmation rather than dread. The war changed its depth: serving as a second lieutenant on the Albanian front in 1940–41, he fell gravely ill with typhus, and the experience lies behind his elegy for a young officer killed there. After a long silence he published The Axion Esti (1959), an ambitious composition modelled on the Orthodox liturgy that traces the genesis, suffering and glory of a poet and of Greece; Mikis Theodorakis’s setting of it as an oratorio made its lines familiar across the country.

Elytis spent periods in Paris, including 1969–72 during the military dictatorship. Later books — The Monogram, Maria Nefeli, The Little Mariner — explored love, the city and the poet’s own vocation, while his essays set out a ‘solar metaphysics’ grounded in the Greek light. The Nobel Prize in 1979 made him the second Greek laureate after Seferis. He died in Athens in 1996.