SOURCE: "The Voices of Elytis's The Axion Esti," in Odysseus Elytis: Analogies of Light, edited by Ivar Ivask, University of Oklahoma Press, 1975, pp. 81-6.

Keeley argues that Elytis's The Axion Esti follows in the tradition of earlier twentieth-century Greek poets such as Angelos Sikelianos, and examines the various voices present in the poem.

The response of Greek readers to Odysseus Elytis's most ambitious poem, The Axion Esti, has been ambivalent during the fifteen years since it appeared in Athens in late 1959 to end more than a decade of silence by a poet then considered to be Greece's best hope among the "younger" generation of poets to follow George Seferis. Though the poem earned the First National Award for Poetry in 1960 and was widely read during the years that followed, the attitude of leading critics remained mixed. A similar ambivalence was also evident in the response of English-speaking...