The role of the poet is to exploit the heritage of both mythology and utopia and to amplify their actions in life, through the language of metaphors. The supreme function of the poet is to make the mystery evident through metaphors. (Nikolas Kalas)

Nikolas Kalas, also known as Nikos Kalamaris or Nikitas Rantos (1907-1988), is the remarkable case of a rebellious Greek poet and thinker who originated from the left in the magazine "Protoporoi" and was one of the first surrealist poets and a sharp critic in the 1930s in Greece. Leaving in 1938, he published "Foyers d'incendie" in Paris among the surrealists and André Breton, and later departed for New York where he became closely associated with the entire movement of modernity in art during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. He returned to Greece sporadically in the 1980s.

His explorations—from the Ionian philosophers to Wittgenstein and from the Portuguese Renaissance and Hieronymus Bosch to surrealism and American avant-garde—make him a unique case of a Greek thinker, whose foreign-language work after 1938—in French and English—remains neglected in Greece. His main theoretical works include: "Foyers d'incendie" (1938), "Art in the Age of Risk" (1968 - "Η τέχνη την εποχή της διακύβευσης", Agra 1997), "Icons and Images of the Sixties" (1971), "Surrealism Pro and Con" (1973), "Transfigurations" (1982).

The intention of this book is to revive from the silence of many decades the problematic that permeates Kalas's critical work and to delve into its themes. Kalas lived in an era where poetry without criticism is unthinkable. In an attempt to interpret Western culture, he started from Syros, Athens, and Santorini, on a continuous westward journey that takes him from Marseille to Paris and from Paris to Lisbon and New York.

Reading a different Kalas from the one we knew through the criticism he wrote in Greek until the late 1930s, or his poetry which he continued to write throughout his life in his mother tongue, we realize that his texts, at the forefront each time, at the time they are written, still represent a radical form of modernist thought, which, anticipating postmodern evaluations, builds a bridge to future ways of viewing things.