pen name of Odysseus Alepoudhélis (1911–96), Greek poet, translator and painter, and Nobel laureate. He was born in Iráklion, Crete, but lived in Athens from the age of three. Elytis abandoned his law studies in his senior year to devote himself to his literary and artistic interests. His first poems, displaying influences of Greek and French Surrealist poets, were published in the 1930s in Nea Ghrámata, (Gr., “New Literature”), a journal that was a forum for young poets.

Elytis served in World War II in 1940–41 as a second lieutenant against Mussolini's forces in Albania after the Italian invasion of Greece. This experience inspired him to write the poem “Heroic and Elegiac Song for the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign.” Combining realistic and mythical imagery to express the Greek's spirit of resistance and struggle for freedom, the poem became popular among the youth of wartime Greece and later was set to music. Elytis was director of programing for the National Broadcasting Institute in Athens in 1945–46 and a regular literary and art critic for the newspaper Kathimerini (Gr., “Daily”) in 1947–48. After four years in Paris, where he studied literature at the Sorbonne and became interested in art and art criticism, Elytis returned to Greece in 1953 to the National Broadcasting Institute for a year.

One of Elytis's major works, To Áxion Esti (1959; Worthy It Is, trans. 1974), was conceived as a poetic cycle and written in demotic, or vernacular, Greek (see GREEK LANGUAGE,); its form and content are reminiscent of the ancient Greek tragic poets, Byzantine hymns, myths of creation, and the Bible. Prior to his voluntary exile (1969–71) in France, he served for three years on the board of the Greek National Theater. While in France, he published, among other works, O ílios o iliátores (1971; The Sovereign Sun, trans. 1974). He also published a collection of essays, Open Book (1974). His poetry was collected and published in Italian and German in the 1970s, and in English and French in the 1980s.

Elytis was awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in literature for his poetry, “which depicts…modern man's struggle for freedom and creativeness.”

See Post–World War II Trends..