Odysseas Elytis first appeared in our literature in November 1935, through the magazine TА ΝΕΑ ΓΡΑΜΜΑΤΑ, which was directed by the critic Andreas Karantonis. His poetry, a virgin hymn to youth, light, health, and the sea of the Aegean, established him instantly. Andreas Karantonis was the first systematic researcher and enthusiastic critic of Elytis's poetry from the moment it appeared.

This volume analyzes and highlights, with commentary, the entire poetic evolution of Elytis and examines its correlation with the poetry of Seferis, particularly with the revolutionary phenomenon of surrealism, which the poet of Áxion Esti assimilated yet also creatively subdued to his own Greek temperament and strict artistic conscience.

The Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature of 1979 to Odysseas Elytis, the second Greek poet after George Seferis (1963). It judged that his poetry interprets and illuminates, in the most ethereal way, all the spiritual, moral, and poetic virtues that have developed from the time of Homer to today, centered around the Aegean, its islands, and the Ionian and Aeolian coasts.

The poetry of Elytis, from its first revelations, showed that it had the future ahead of it. This was proven by the more than half a century of its existence so far. Greeks have read, read, and even sung Elytis. The Nobel, which still shines, will fade somewhere, but the crystalline essence of this poetry will always radiate Apollonian light, and its seas, its Madonnas, and its girls will remain untainted by the miasmas of decaying times.

The book Regarding Odysseas Elytis is the broadest critical avenue that has been opened towards the multiple poetic secrets of the great creation of the poet who composed Áxion Esti.