SOURCE: A review of Open Papers, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 241, No. 40, October 3, 1994, pp. 64-5.

In the following review, the critic discusses how Elytis's Open Papers tells of a career guided by luck, risk, and a belief in modernism.

Part autobiography, part statement of artistic principles, the five essays collected here cover Elytis's journey to poetry, from discovering the works of Sappho at age 16 to winning the Nobel Prize in 1979. Born in Crete in 1911, at 18 Elytis heard "a secret voice" that led him to abandon everything for his art. As a student in the 1930s he was totally absorbed in the Surrealists with Éluard, Breton and Lorca offering new perspectives to a young man already influenced by Freud, Baudelaire and Novalis. He pays tribute to these and other writers in the essay "For Good Measure," which also honors Picasso for his insistence on turning upside down one's view of...