Odysseys Elytis … was the youngest of the group of pre-World War II poets, sometimes called the Generation of the 30's, who established the new voice and new sensibility that still dominate modern Greek literature.

George Seferis, Greece's other Nobel laureate in literature, also belonged to this group and helped to shape the direction of Elytis's early work, which shared an enthusiasm for contemporary French poetry as well as for sources in the rich Greek tradition.

Elytis's first poems offered a surrealism that had a distinctly personal tone and a specific local habitation. The tone was lyrical, humorous, fanciful, everything that is young; the habitation was the landscape of Greece, particularly the landscape of the Aegean islands.

Poems such as "The Mad Pomegranate Tree," "Marina of the Rocks" and "Body of Summer" created a personal mythology that depended on repeated metamorphoses: a morning disposition that becomes a tree, a...