SOURCE: A review of O mikros naftilos, in World Literature Today, Vol. 60, No. 3, Summer, 1986, p. 500.

In the following review, Decavalles praises Elytis's O mikros naftilos stating that it "stands unquestionably on a level with Elytis's other major poems and also constitutes a comprehensive summation of his life and creativity."

Odysseus Elytis has dominantly and insistently been the poet of the bright and affirmative view of life. A worshiper of the sun, he has seen its light bathe and make lucid and diaphanous his eternally youthful Aegean world, which he has wished to see inspired, purified, and sanctified by Eros or Love in both its physical and its spiritual sense. Hence his "solar metaphysics."

Increasingly, however, personal and historical experience, age, mortality, and the approach of death have brought into Elytis's vision the darker, more pragmatic aspects of life as well, to which he constantly opposes his heavenly light...