SOURCE: "Time versus Eternity: Odysseus Elytis in the 1980s," in World Literature Today, Vol. 62, No. 1, Winter, 1988, pp. 22-32.

In the following essay, Decavalles discusses the themes of death and eternity in Elytis's Diary of an Invisible April and asserts that this poem is darker than the poet's other work.

For close to five decades, the poetry of Odysseus Elytis grew and blossomed with unaging and hopeful youthfulness in its battle against time and decay. It kept its undiminished commitment to extend and raise the material world to a higher sphere, to its pure, immaterial, imperishable essence. It kept alive its power to transform sorrow into joy, darkness into light, and negation into affirmation of life. Insistently it repeated its belief in man's potential and capacity to detect, to discover in the world of matter the lasting, spiritual, visionary messages that reveal a superearthly realm abiding within it. It...