Declining the immaculate discipline and the consent to eliminate that rescues Cavafy's poetry for the critical intelligence, Elytis is a paragon of enthusiasm, of protean moods, multiple forms; his purpose, in essence: the deification of the sun and of the body of man. An early poem, "Breasting the Current," establishes the mercurial disposition which—despite commentators' belief that the invasion of Crete and combat experience universalized his reactions—thereafter characterizes his oceanic output…. [The Sovereign Sun] will give you the full range of this unconfined and to me bewildering poet; it also includes a part of Elytis' masterwork, The Axion Esti…. The title simply (!) means "worthy it is" and has a double Mariolatric connotation. When you learn further (as a merely introductory sample) that Elytis plays with anagrams that include his own name and Ellas (Greece), you begin to suspect that an advanced degree of Eliotic abstruseness lurks in the translator's description of the three-part poem as "a kind of spiritual autobiography which attempts to dramatize the national and philosophic extensions of a highly personal sensibility." I'm forced to add that for me this seems a highly arrogant sensibility, trying to be all things to all men while incorporating the national tragedy in his own persistently conspicuous ego. Part One ("Genesis") is a truly beautiful invocation of eternal Greece; the second, a kaleidoscopic vision of the War and its sequel, written in an anthology of styles, prose and verse, descends into bathos at the end with a vulgar and recognizably Whitmanesque prophecy; the final section is a Gloria in praise of some state of mind or soul I can't trust myself to interpret briefly, since I haven't half clarified its eloquent if unrestrained idealism and its eclectic imagery. I fear you have to be Greek to accept this poem (and many more by Elytis) in all its verbal diffusion and its emotional importunity. (pp. 587-88)