num_pages: 114
description: Lyrical, vigorous, deeply inventive, the poetry of Greece's Odysseus Elytis has been known to American readers largely through short and scattered selections by the present translators. The world-wide recognition that only recently came to Elytis with the award of the 1979 Nobel Prize for Literature makes this collection - drawn from all periods of his long and distinguished career - an especially welcome event.Selected Poems traces the development of Elytis's oeuvre from the early surrealism of Orientation (1940), a celebration of the sacred aspects of visible things, through the new dramatic style of The Axion Esti (1959), a spiritual autobiography and meditation on modern Greece, through his most recent work, including Maria Nefeli (1979), in which he continues to experiment with new forms for expressing his perennial themes. With their distinctive blend of classical metaphor and personal mythology, these poems are splendid evidence - as the Nobel citation read - of "the sensuous strength and intellectual clearsightedness" with which Odysseus Elytis "depicts modern man's struggle for freedom and creativeness."
language: English
title: Odysseus Elytis: Selected Poems
titlecomplete: Odysseus Elytis: Selected Poems
genres: Nobel Prize, Poetry, Greece
ratings_count: 98
publisher: Penguin