There is no easier way to damn a poet than to call him "a poet's poet," and this has so frequently happened to Odysseus Elytis that it is time to insist on the accessibility of his work, on its timeliness and relevance to ourselves. His language is so choice, his range of metaphor so large, that he has presented quite a task to his translators. He has a romantic and lyrical mind which deploys a metaphysic of complete intellectual sensuality—the rocks, the islands, the blue Greek sea, the winds; they are at once "real" and also "signatures" in the alchemical sense. He makes his magic with them, and it is peculiarly Greek magic that he makes. Using the most up-to-date methods in technique, he has, at the same time, insisted that at bottom poetry is not simply a craft or a skill but an act of divination...