"There were generations that, after the war, were initiated into the thought of Dimitris Kapetanakis," writes Emmanuela Kantzia in the Preface of Volume I of the author's complete works. A researcher and comparative scholar of European literature, she has extracted from the archives and edited this significant edition of the Published (Volume One) and Unpublished (Volume Two, in preparation) works of this “initiator” poet and essayist, whose brief life (Smyrna 1912 – London 1944) was enriched by rich and mature aesthetic, reflective, and critical studies covering a wide range of knowledge fields.

However, the post-war devoted readers knew very few of these, mainly his essays Eros and Time and the Mythology of the Beautiful. He himself and his work never reached the wider public. Enigmatic and unclassified, a man of letters and art in the legendary 1930s, Dimitris Kapetanakis, from his student years in Athens, had a friendly connection with his teacher Panagiotis Kanellopoulos and the circle of Ioannis Sycoutris, while later, in Heidelberg, he studied alongside Karl Jaspers and was enchanted by the imposing poetic personality of Stefan George.

The extensive Introduction by the editor follows him in the spiritual and human wanderings of his troubled life until his refuge in England in ’39, on the eve of the war, where in the next five years, until his death, he would emerge as a genuine representative of modern English poetry.

Volume One – The Published (divided into Book A and Book B) includes his essays and studies (those on Plato's Euthydemus and on Rimbaud), his English texts (among others, on George, on Dostoevsky, on English poetry), his book reviews and critical notes (on Rudolf Farner, Tsarouchis, Skippy, Tsatsos, Prevelakis, Kant, etc.), his poems in Greek and English, his one-act play The Tempest, as well as his translations into Greek or English (of Hölderlin, Anthony Huxley, Elytis, Prevelakis, Kanellopoulos).

Dimitris Kapetanakis, a metaphysical thinker but also a worldly man who wrestled deeply with the enigma of love and learning, was distinguished as a remarkable teacher, through his renowned lectures in Athens in the ’30s, for his pedagogical way of awakening the genius of his students, leading them to the path of continuous inquiry.