SOURCE: "The 'Heroic and Elegiac Song for the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign': The Transition from the Early to the Later Elytis," in Odysseus Elytis: Analogies of Light, edited by Ivar Ivask, University of Oklahoma Press, 1975, pp. 75-9.

In the following excerpt, Rotolo argues that the Heroic and Elegiac Song for the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign marks a transition in Elytis's poetry, the war between Italy and Greece heightening his love for his native land and forcing upon him a wider consciousness, at once more human and more political.

The poetry of Odysseus Elytis prior to the Ázma iroikó ke pénthimo yia ton haméno anthipolohaghó tis Alvanías (Heroic and Elegiac Song for the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign) has long engaged the critics' attention. In addition to those who stubbornly rejected all innovation, even Marxist criticism, which in...