SOURCE: "Time versus Eternity: Odysseus Elytis in the 1980s," in World Literature Today, Vol. 62, No. 1, pp. 22-32.

In the excerpt below, Decavalles examines Three Poems under a Flag of Convenience, suggesting that the collection effectively captures Elýtis's transcendental vision and the transformative powers of art.

When we turn to the Three Poems under a Flag of Convenience (1982), we may possibly understand the evoked efkerías (opportunity, convenience) as another chance, another try to admonish and so to break the isolation, the increased loneliness always extant in Elytis's admonitions. In their unity and sequence the three poems here, each divided into seven parts, bear the individual titles "The Garden Sees," "The Almond of the World," and "Ad Libitum." The viewing garden is obviously the paradise-oriented angle of vision, detecting through sunny lucidity and projecting through instantaneous revelations life's real essence and truth. The "almond of the world" must...