Axion Esti
When Odysseus Elytis was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy's citation singled out "The Axion Esti", first published in 1959, as "one of twentieth-century literature's most concentrated and richly faceted poems". It can be seen both as a secular oratorio, reflecting the Greek heritage and the country's revolutionary spirit, and also as a kind of autobiography, in which the spiritual roots of the poet's very individual sensibility are set in the wider philosophical context of the Greek tradition. In his evocation of eternal Greece, his vision of the war and its aftermath, and his concluding celebration of human life, Elytis is a true voice of our age – a deeply personal lyric poet who speaks for humanity at large.
About the author
Odysseus Elytis, born in Crete in 1911, began to publish his poetry in the 1930s. He took part in the campaign against the Italian fascists in Albania in 1940-41. He was one of the most prominent poets of the Greek resistance during the Nazi occupation. The Nobel Prize was awarded to him in 1979 "for his poetry which, against the background of Greek tradition, depicts with sensuous strength and intellectual clear-sightedness modern man's struggle for freedom and creativeness". He died in Athens in 1996.