Axion Esti

by OdysseasElytes (Author)

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  Paperback
  1980

  $18.09

  The Axion Esti is probably the most widely read volume of verse to have appeared in Greece since World War II and remains a classic today. Those who follow the music of Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis have been especially drawn to Odysseus Elytis's work, his prose is widely considered a mirror to the revolutionary music of Theodorakis. The autobiographical elements are constantly colored by allusion to the history of Greece, thus, the poems express a contemporary consciousness fully resonant with those echoes of the past that have served most to shape the modern Greek experience.

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  When Odysseus Elytis was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy's citation singled out The Axion Esti , first published in 1959, as 'one of twentieth-century literature's most concentrated and richly faceted poems.' It can be seen both as a secular oratorio, reflecting the Greek heritage and the country's revolutionary spirit, and also as a kind of autobiography, in which the spiritual roots of the poet's very individual sensibility are set in the wider philosophical context of the Greek tradition. In his evocation of eternal Greece, his vision of the war and its aftermath, and his concluding celebration of human life, Elytis is a true voice of our age A- a deeply personal lyric poet who speaks for humanity at large.