Odysseas Elytis was born on 2 November 1911 in Heraklion, Crete. He was the youngest of the six children of Panagiotis Alepoudelis and Maria Vranas. His father originated from the settlement of Kalamiari in Panagiouda, Lesvos, and had settled in the city of Heraklion in 1895, when, in collaboration with his brother, he founded a soap-making and olive-kernel oil factory. The older name of the Alepoudelis family was Lemonos, which later changed to Alepos. His mother came from Pappados, Lesvos.
In 1914 his father moved his factories to Piraeus and the family settled in Athens. In 1917 Odysseas Elytis enrolled in the private school of D. N. Makris, where he studied for seven years, having among his teachers I. M. Panagiotopoulos and Ioannis Th. Kakridis. He spent the first summers of his life in Crete, Lesvos, and Spetses. In November 1920, after the fall of Eleftherios Venizelos, his family faced persecution due to its adherence to Venizelist ideas. Venizelos himself had close ties with the family and was often hosted at their home on the Akleidio estate. The culmination of the persecutions experienced by his family was the arrest of his father. In 1923 he traveled with his family to Europe, visiting Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Yugoslavia. In Lausanne, the poet had the opportunity to meet in person Eleftherios Venizelos, who was living in exile after his fall.
In the autumn of 1924 he enrolled in the Third Boys’ Gymnasium of Athens and collaborated with the magazine I Diaplasis ton Paidon, using various pseudonyms. As he himself admits, it was then that he first became acquainted with modern Greek literature—he who, nourished by major works of world literature, spent all his money buying books and magazines. In addition to his engagement with literature, he actively participated in mountaineering excursions in the mountains of Attica and, as a reaction to his inclination for reading, turned to sports. Even the books he bought had to be related to Greek nature: works by Dimitrios Kambouroglou, Kostas Pasagiannis, Stefanos Granitsas, and a three-volume Guide to Greece. In 1925 his father died. In the spring of 1927, overexertion and adenopathy forced him to abandon his athletic pursuits, confining him to bed for about three months. Mild symptoms of neurasthenia followed, and around the same period he turned definitively toward literature—an event that coincided with the emergence of several new literary magazines, such as Nea Estia and Ellinika Grammata.
In the summer of 1928 he received his secondary school diploma with a grade of 73/11. After pressure from his parents, he decided to study chemistry, beginning special preparatory courses for the entrance examinations of the following year. During the same period, he came into contact with the work of Konstantinos Cavafy and Andreas Kalvos, renewing his acquaintance with the captivating ancient lyric poetry. At the same time, he discovered the work of Paul Éluard and the French Surrealists, who had a significant influence on his ideas about literature and “forced him to pay attention and boldly acknowledge the possibilities that lyric poetry presented, in its essence as a free practice.”
Literature
Under the influence of his turn toward literature, he abandoned his intention to pursue chemistry and in 1930 enrolled in the Law School of Athens. When the “Ideocratic Philosophical Group” was founded at the University in 1933, with the participation of Konstantinos Tsatsos, Panagiotis Kanellopoulos, Ioannis Theodorakopoulos, and Ioannis Sykoutris, Elytis was one of the student representatives, taking part in the “Saturday Symposia” that were organized. During the same period, he studied contemporary Greek poetry, including the work of Kaisar Emmanuel (the Paraphonos Avlos), the collection Stou Glitomou to Chazi by Theodoros Dorrus, Strofi (1931) by Giorgos Seferis, and Poems (1933) by Nikitas Randos. With enthusiasm, he simultaneously continued his wanderings across Greece, which he himself describes:
“True pioneers, for days on end we moved on hungry and unshaven, clinging to the body of a dying Chevrolet, going up and down sand dunes, crossing lagoons, amid clouds of dust or under merciless downpours, endlessly surmounting every obstacle and devouring the kilometers with a voracity that only our twenty years of age and our love for this small land we were discovering could justify.”
During the same period, he formed a closer relationship with Giorgos Sarantaris (1908–1941), who encouraged him in his poetic efforts at a time when Elytis was still wavering over whether he should publish his work, and who also introduced him to the circle of Nea Grammata (1935–1940, 1944). This journal, directed by Andreas Karantonis and featuring collaborations by distinguished older and younger Greek writers (such as Giorgos Seferis, Georgios Theotokas, Angelos Terzakis, Kosmas Politis, Angelos Sikelianos, among others), brought contemporary Western artistic trends to Greece and familiarized the reading public primarily with younger poets, through translations of representative works or informative articles about their poetry. It became the intellectual organ of the Generation of the ’30s, hosting in its pages all innovative elements, favorably judging and promoting the creations of new Greek poets.
The Circle of Nea Grammata
As Elytis himself acknowledges, 1935 proved to be a particularly significant year in his intellectual journey. In January, the journal Nea Grammata was launched. In February, he met Andreas Embirikos, who memorably described him as: “The great endurance athlete of the imagination, with the entire universe as his field and Love as his stride. His work, each new work of his, girded by a small rainbow, is a promise to humanity, a gift which, if not yet held in everyone’s hands, is due solely and exclusively to their own unworthiness.” In the same month, Embirikos delivered a lecture entitled “Surrealism, a New Poetic School,” which constituted the first official presentation of surrealism to the Greek public. The two poets formed a close friendship that lasted more than twenty-five years.
In March of that same year, alongside Seferis’s Mythistorema, Embirikos’s poetry collection Ypsikaminos was published, featuring poetry that was orthodoxly surrealist. Elytis, ten years younger, saw before him a wide-open door to a new poetic reality, in which he could, with his own resources, lay the foundations of his poetic edifice. At Easter, the two friends visited Lesvos, where, with the support of the Mytilenian painters Orestis Kanellis and Takis Eleftheriadis, they came into contact with the art of the folk painter Theophilos, who had died a year earlier.
During a gathering of the Nea Grammata circle at the home of the poet Georgios K. Katsimbalis, those present kept some of Elytis’s manuscripts under the pretext of studying them more carefully, secretly typeset them under the pseudonym “Odysseas Vranas,” and aimed to publish them, later presenting the result to Elytis himself. Initially, he requested their withdrawal by sending a special letter to Katsimbalis; however, he was eventually persuaded to allow their publication, accepting instead the pseudonym “Odysseas Elytis.”
The publication of his first poems in Nea Grammata took place in November 1935, in the journal’s 11th issue. Elytis also published translations of poems by Paul Éluard, and in his introductory article he presented their creator as the poet who “whatever he writes reaches our hearts immediately, strikes us full in the chest like a wave of another life, drawn from the sum of our most magical dreams.”
In 1936, at the First International Surrealist Exhibition of Athens, Elytis presented paintings using the collage technique. That year, the group of young writers was more solid and larger. Elytis also became acquainted with the poet Nikos Gatsos, who a few years later published the surrealist Amorgos. In 1937, he served his military duty at the Reserve Officers’ School in Corfu, while corresponding with Nikos Gatsos and Giorgos Seferis, who were in Korçë. Shortly after his discharge, the following year, Mitsos Papanikolaou published the article “The Poet Odysseas Elytis” in Nea Grammata, which contributed significantly to his establishment.
In 1939, he definitively abandoned his legal studies and, after several publications of his poems in journals, his first poetry collection entitled Orientations (Prosanatolismoi) was published. The following year, his poems were translated into a foreign language for the first time, when Samuel Baud Bovy published an article on Greek poetry in the Swiss journal Formes et Couleurs.
On the Albanian Front
With the outbreak of the war in 1940, Elytis enlisted as a second lieutenant in the Headquarters Command of the First Army Corps. On 13 December 1940 he was transferred to the combat zone, and on 26 February of the following year he was hospitalized with a severe case of typhoid fever at the Ioannina Hospital. During the Occupation, he was one of the founding members of the “Palamas Circle,” established on 30 May 1943. There, in the spring of 1942, he presented his essay “The True Physiognomy and the Lyrical Boldness of A. Kalvos.”
In November 1943, the collection The First Sun together with Variations on a Sunbeam was published in 6,000 numbered copies, a hymn by Elytis to the joy of life and the beauty of nature. In Nea Grammata, which began to be republished in 1944, he published his essay “The Girls,” while from 1945 he began collaborating with the journal Tetradio, translating poems by Federico García Lorca and presenting, in first publication, his poetic work Heroic and Elegiac Song for the Lost Second Lieutenant of Albania. This work appears to have been written in either 1941 or 1943 and, according to one view, was composed to honor his fellow soldiers in Albania, while according to another, it was written for his friend, the poet Giorgos Sarantaris, who also fought in Albania and died after being transferred to Athens seriously ill.
The war of 1940 also inspired him to write other works, Kindness in the Wolf Ravines, The Albanian Epic, and the permanently lost Barbaria. During the period 1945–1946, he was appointed for a short time as Program Director at the National Radio Foundation, following a recommendation by Seferis, who was director of the political office of the regent Archbishop of Athens, Damaskinos. He also collaborated with the Anglo-Hellenic Review, where he published several essays, as well as with Eleftheria and Kathimerini, where he maintained a column on art criticism until 1948.
In Europe
In 1948 he traveled to Switzerland and subsequently settled in Paris, where he attended philosophy courses at the Sorbonne. Describing his impressions of his stay in France, he commented on his feelings and thoughts: “A journey that I thought would bring me closer to the sources of modern art. Without reckoning that it would at the same time bring me very close to my old loves as well—to the centers where the first Surrealists had been active, to the cafés where the Manifestos had been discussed, to the Rue de l’Odéon and the Place Blanche, to Montparnasse and Saint-Germain-des-Prés.”
In Paris he was a founding member of the International Association of Art Critics (Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art) and also had the opportunity to meet André Breton, Paul Éluard, Albert Camus, Tristan Tzara, Pierre Jean Jouve, Joan Miró, and others.
With the help of the Greek-French art critic Stratis Eleftheriadis (E. Tériade), who had been the first to recognize the value of the work of his compatriot Theofilos, he met the great painters Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Alberto Giacometti, Giorgio de Chirico, and Pablo Picasso, about whose work he later wrote articles and to whose art he dedicated the poem “Ode to Picasso.” In the summer of 1950 he traveled to Spain, and during his stay in London, from late 1950 until May 1951, he collaborated with the BBC, delivering four radio talks. A little earlier, he had begun composing Axion Esti.
Return to Greece
After his return to Greece, in 1952 he became a member of the “Group of Twelve,” which annually awarded literary prizes. He resigned from the group in March 1953 but rejoined it two years later. In 1953 he once again assumed, for one year, the position of Director of Programming at the National Radio Foundation (E.I.R.), appointed by the Papagos government, a post from which he resigned the following year. At the end of that year he became a member of the European Society of Culture in Venice and a member of the Board of Directors of Karolos Koun’s Art Theatre.
In 1958, after an approximately fifteen-year period of poetic silence, excerpts from Axion Esti were published in the journal Epitheorisi Technis. The work was published in March 1960 by Ikaros Editions, although it bears the printing date of December 1959. A few months later, Axion Esti was awarded the First State Prize for Poetry. During the same period, Six and One Remorses for the Sky was also published (Ikaros Editions), while in Germany a selection of his poems appeared under the title Körper des Sommers. However, 1960 marked Odysseas Elytis with a profound double bereavement, as he lost both his mother and his brother Konstantinos.
In 1961, at the invitation of the government, he visited the United States from late March to early June. The following year, after a trip to Rome, he visited the Soviet Union as a guest, together with Andreas Embirikos and Giorgos Theotokas. Their itinerary included Odessa, Moscow—where he gave an interview—and Leningrad.
In 1964 the recording of the musical setting of Axion Esti by Mikis Theodorakis began, although Elytis’s collaboration with the composer had already started in 1961. Theodorakis’s oratorio was included in the Athens Festival and was initially intended to be presented at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus. However, the Ministry of the Presidency of the Government refused to grant permission for the venue, resulting in Elytis and Theodorakis withdrawing the work, which was eventually presented on October 19 at the Rex cinema-theatre.
In 1965 he was awarded the Order of the Phoenix, Commander rank, by King Constantine, and during the following period he completed the collection of essays that would form Open Papers. At the same time, he traveled to Sofia as a guest of the Union of Bulgarian Writers and to Egypt. After the coup of April 21, 1967, he withdrew from public life, devoting himself mainly to painting and the technique of collage, and declined an invitation to recite his poems in Paris because of the dictatorship in power. On May 3, 1969, he left Greece and settled in Paris, where he began writing the collection Photodentro (The Light Tree).
A few months later he spent some time in Cyprus, while in 1971 he returned to Greece. The following year he refused to accept the Grand Prize for Literature instituted by the dictatorship. After the fall of the junta, he was appointed President of the Board of Directors of EIRT and, for a second time, a member of the Board of Directors of the National Theatre (1974–1977). In the years that followed, he continued his multifaceted intellectual work. In 1978 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Faculty of Philosophy of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
Nobel Prize in Literature
In 1979 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The announcement of the award by the Swedish Academy was made on October 18, “for his poetry, which, against the backdrop of Greek tradition, brings to life with sensuous force and intellectual clarity of vision the struggle of modern humanity for freedom and creativity,” according to the Academy’s citation.
Elytis attended the official award ceremony on December 10, 1979, receiving the prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf and gaining worldwide recognition. The award ceremony in Stockholm was broadcast in a recorded transmission by ERT on December 10, 1979. The following year, he deposited the gold medal and the diplomas of the prize at the Benaki Museum.
The awarding of the Nobel Prize was followed by numerous honors and distinctions both in Greece and abroad. Among these were a tribute paid to him in a special session of the Hellenic Parliament, his proclamation as an honorary doctor of the University of the Sorbonne, the establishment of a chair of Modern Greek Studies titled the “Elytis Chair” at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and the awarding of the Benson Silver Medal by the Royal Society of Literature in London.
He died on March 18, 1996, of a heart attack in Athens.
His Relationship with Politics
Elytis could not be characterized as a political poet. Very rarely did he express specific political allegories in his poems. Generally, he stayed away from politics, political parties, and ideologies. His poetry mainly reflects his love for Hellenism and the Orthodox tradition.
According to an article by Dimitris Maronitis, in his youth Elytis had shown a strong interest in Revolutionary Marxism in the form of Trotskyism. This interest was even expressed through his translation of some of Trotsky’s articles for a student magazine.
Later, given his bourgeois background, Elytis had a mild connection with the right-wing political sphere.[citation needed] However, in the early years of the post-dictatorship period, he declined an offer from the New Democracy party to be included on their national parliamentary candidate list, remaining faithful to his principle of not actively participating in political practice. In 1977, he also refused the honorary title of Academician, a decision he supported in a written letter.
Despite this, Elytis inspired the name of the political party Political Spring, as its founder, Antonis Samaras, stated in an interview. In 1995, Samaras proposed Elytis as a candidate for President of the Hellenic Republic, but the poet again declined.
After his death, in 2012, then-Prime Minister Antonis Samaras used some of Elytis’s verses in a New Democracy campaign advertisement. This provoked reactions, particularly from Elytis’s last partner, who emphasized that his poetry should not be appropriated by any political party, as Elytis belongs to all Greeks. Nonetheless, New Democracy did not withdraw the ad.
Personal Life
Elytis took great care to keep his personal life strictly private, away from the public eye. At the time of his death, his only close living relatives were Evangelos Alepoudelis and the daughter of his brother, Theodoros, Myrsini Alepoudeli-Leonidopoulou. His last life partner was the poet Ioulita Iliopoulou, who also inherited the intellectual property rights to his work.
Work
Odysseas Elytis was one of the last representatives of the literary Generation of the 1930s, characterized by the ideological tension between Greek tradition and European modernism. Elytis himself described his position within this generation as peculiar, noting: “On the one hand, I was the last of a generation that bowed to the sources of Greekness, and on the other, I was the first of another that embraced the revolutionary theories of a modern movement.”
His work has often been associated with the surrealist movement, although Elytis early distanced himself from the “orthodox” surrealism followed by his contemporaries such as Andreas Empeirikos, Nikos Engonopoulos, and Nikolaos Kalas. He was influenced by surrealism and borrowed certain elements, which he reformed according to his personal poetic vision, closely linked to lyricism and the Greek folk tradition. Surrealist influences are most easily observed in his first two poetry collections, Orientations (1940) and The First Sun (1943).
One of his greatest achievements was the poem Axion Esti (1959), through which Elytis claimed a place in national literature, simultaneously offering a “collective mythology” and a “national work.” Literary critics highlighted its aesthetic value as well as its technical precision. Its language was praised for the classical exactness of phrasing, and its strict structure was seen as a feat that “nowhere reveals the slightest violation of spontaneous expression.” The “national” character of Axion Esti was emphasized by critics such as D. N. Maronitis and Georgios P. Savvidis, the latter noting in an early review that Elytis deserved the epithet “national,” comparing his work to that of Dionysios Solomos, Kostis Palamas, and Angelos Sikelianos.
Elytis’ later work became more introspective, returning to the sensuality of his early period and what he himself described as an expression of his “metaphysics of light”: “Thus the light, which is the beginning and the end of every revelatory phenomenon, manifests itself through the achievement of ever greater visibility, a final transparency within the poem that allows one to see simultaneously through matter and through the soul.” A unique and significant later work is the scenic poem Maria Nefeli (1978), in which he for the first time employed the collage technique in his poetry.
Beyond his poetic output, Elytis also left important essays, collected in the volumes Open Papers (1974) and En Lefko (1992), as well as notable translations of European poets and playwrights.
BIOGRAPHIES
