The first book about Elytis… there exists at least one book that truly concerns Elytis. The texts of this book, written by Ilias Petropoulos, are not essays; they are love letters. Tender, therefore, and a bit ecstatic overturning of criticism into a whirlwind of strange intoxication.

A real passion has invaded the analysis, making it forget its principles, laws, and constraints, leading it into the realm of literature… And if there is something that makes it relevant, it is not, of course, the fact that Elytis was awarded the Nobel Prize, but that a romantic writer paradoxically returns from a forgotten past: we have become accustomed to seeing Petropoulos as an eccentric researcher of what is called “subculture,” that is, as a person devoted to all kinds of scandalous inquiries that can only take place in the dim light of the margins.

ELYTIS MORALIS TSAROUCHIS aptly shows that the man who has not ceased to shock censorship for many years is not only “indiscreet” but also poetic… Petropoulos is indeed a poet, and from this perspective, it would be much better for critics to engage with him than for the insatiable machinery of justice…

To the exact extent that he does not write criticism but “poetry” or “love letters,” Petropoulos is ultimately the most modern of critics because he manages to speak about sensitivity, but, conversely, a sensitive person who speaks about the moral of the work…

The text often concludes in a kind of intoxication, in a tender outburst shared between bitterness and optimism… The boundaries of literature are thus wonderfully expanded here, and the critic becomes the most sensitive of people: a lover… The art of love letter writing is a forgotten art that was once considered equal to literature. Petropoulos is the last letter writer, that is, the mythical writer who managed to combine “correspondence” not anymore with rhetoric (that is, with a craft of persuasion) as his predecessors did, but with two complex, vibrant quests: poetry and criticism.