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.

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 concentrated and richly faceted poems.'

Odysseus Elytis (1911-96) won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1979. With Seferis and the 'Generation of the Thirties', he introduced French Surrealism into Greek poetry. Kimon Friar's classic translation The Sovereign Sun begins with his brilliantly sensuous early poems. It has large selections from his master work, Axion Esti (1959), and includes the whole of his Heroic and Elegiac Song for the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign (1945). His Nobel Prize citation stated: 'Against the background of Greek tradition, his poetry depicts with sensuous strength and clearsightedness modern man's struggle for freedom and creativeness.'

"Originally published in 1997, The Collected Poems of Odysseus Elytis was the fist complete collection of Elytis's poems in any language." "For this expanded new edition, translators Jeffrey Carson and Nikos Sarris have added sixty free verse and prose poems from the posthumous 1998 volume From Close By; a set of song lyrics, The Rhos of Eros; and a cantata, The Sovereign Sun."--BOOK JACKET.

The Nobel laureate's prizewinning poem tells of a young female radical of our age and comments on history, politics, and culture to create a portrait of the modern situation.