Declining the immaculate discipline and the consent to eliminate that rescues Cavafy's poetry for the critical intelligence, Elytis is a paragon of enthusiasm, of protean moods, multiple forms; his purpose, in essence: the deification of the sun and of the body of man. An early poem, "Breasting the Current," establishes the mercurial disposition which—despite commentators' belief that the invasion of Crete and combat experience universalized his reactions—thereafter characterizes his oceanic output…. [The Sovereign Sun] will give you the full range of this unconfined and to me bewildering poet; it also includes a part of Elytis' masterwork, The Axion Esti…. The title simply (!) means "worthy it is" and has a double Mariolatric connotation. When you learn further (as a merely introductory sample) that Elytis plays with anagrams that include his own name and Ellas (Greece), you begin to suspect that an advanced degree of Eliotic abstruseness lurks...