The Axion Esti
by Odysseus Elytis
Summary
This is a long poem, published in 1959, built in three parts, Genesis, The Passion and The Gloria, that take their titles and their shape from Orthodox Christian liturgy. Odysseus Elytis is not writing scripture, though; he is using the liturgy's structure to hold together a personal mythology of his own making, the creation of an imagined world set directly against the German occupation of Greece and the civil war that followed it. Sections move between celebration and atrocity without much warning, praise remaining the poem's dominant register even when what it is describing is violence, and Elytis treats the light of the Aegean throughout as something closer to a moral fact than a description of scenery.
The poem's movements touch on justice, love, exile and prophecy in different registers, some closer to hymn, some closer to lament, unified less by a single narrative than by the voice running through all of them, a speaker trying to build meaning out of a landscape and a history that keep threatening to overwhelm him. Elytis had served as an infantry officer during Greece's war against Axis invasion beginning in 1940, and was hospitalized with typhus during that service, and the poem's wartime sections carry the weight of someone describing catastrophe he lived through rather than one he only heard about.
Reading it means moving through a text that borrows the shape of worship without asking for religious belief, which rewards a reader willing to follow image and sound over straightforward argument. It suits anyone drawn to poetry that treats a whole national landscape as a moral subject, and it remains the work critics point to first when explaining why Elytis is considered his generation's central Greek poet.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Odysseus Elytis the 1979 Nobel Prize in Literature for poetry which, against the background of Greek tradition, depicts with sensuous strength and intellectual clear sightedness modern man's struggle for freedom and creativeness, making him the second Greek writer to win the literature prize, after the poet Giorgos Seferis in 1963. The Axion Esti, widely considered Elytis's central work, is the book most closely tied to that citation.
The composer Mikis Theodorakis set sections of the poem to music, first performed in 1964, and the resulting songs became widely known across Greece, sung as protest during the military dictatorship of the following years, a rare case of a difficult modernist poem entering ordinary popular memory. Set to music, the poem became a revered anthem whose verses Greeks sing against injustice and in resistance as much as for their beauty, and Elytis, who kept cordial relations with the more politically radical poet Yannis Ritsos, saw his difficult modernist text pass into common memory in a way few poems of its kind ever do.