Odysseas Elytis Critical Essay | Critical Review by Jeffrey Carson

Critical Review by Jeffrey Carson

SOURCE: "Elegiac Elytis: 'Elegies of Jutting Rock'," in World Literature Today, Vol. 66, No. 3, Summer, 1992, pp. 445-46.

In the following review, Carson examines the influences on Elytis's elegies, focusing specifically on the "eternal values" of Elytis's verse: love, awe, and redemption.

Odysseus Elytis's eightieth birthday, on 2 November 1991 was widely celebrated in Greece. Literary journals undertook dedicatory issues, television and radio produced special programs, concerts were given. Elytis answered us with the best gift of all, a new volume of poems, Ta eleyía tis Oxópetras (The Elegies of Jutting Rock), his fourth since his Nobel Prize in 1979.

Jung suggests that the artist in old age must reverse the expansions of youth and focus on what is most meaningful and permanent. The aged Rembrandt's sitters radiate a dim halo of inner, unnatural light, and Titian's later backgrounds smolder with sanguine brushstrokes. The old Yeats climbs in his...
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