SOURCE: "Eliot and Elytis: Poet of Time, Poet of Space," in Comparative Literature, Vol. 36, No. 3, Summer, 1984, pp. 238-57.

In the following essay, Malkoff compares and contrasts Elytis's To Axion Esti to T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets and asserts that both poets are seeking a unity of being in their work.

In this essay I propose to explore the differences between T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and Odysseus Elytis' To Axion Esti, in the hope of discovering patterns that may contribute to an understanding of their poetry in general. As a preliminary to such an investigation, it would be prudent to establish a common ground of discourse for two poems that are only rarely mentioned in the same breath, and which, at first glance, may seem quite unrelated. Is is a commonplace in criticism of modern Greek literature to note that while George Seferis, Greece's first Nobel Prize-winning poet...