Out of his long life Odysseas Elytis has made a long poem, The Little Mariner. Ironically, it consists mostly of prose, as even a poet's life must. Another imbalance, in the structure, sharpens this point. Four types of sections—"The Little Mariner," "Anoint the Ariston," "With Light and Death," and "What one Loves"—are presented in succession three times, but with one more each of "The Little Mariner" and "Anoint the Ariston" rounding out the total to fourteen. Only the three sections of "With Light and Death," together with the "Entrance" and "Exit," are written in verse. The remaining prose modulates from "The Little Mariner" sections—where it reads like the captions of a bitter slide show of Greek history—through the ethical meditations in poetic prose of "Anoint the Ariston," to the catalogs of "What One Loves," a checklist of cultural literacy, a glossary of Elytis' poetic vocabulary, and "Snapshots" of islands and ports. Prose is, thus, the mode of the temporal and of defeat. The losses of "The Little Mariner" sections literally surround and out-number the personal experiences of "What One Loves." But the final image of the former, the escape of Bishop Makarios from assassins, suggests a way out, leading to the last section of "Anoint the Ariston," where a discussion of poetry, the mode of the immortal, is laid in the scales. Throughout the poems of "With Light and Death" Elytis has been developing images of eternal youth, powerful yet innocent, of androgynous but undeniable sexuality, and the "Exit" offers some grounds of assurance that we may return to the beginning.

The difficulties posed by the poem's structure, which is even more elaborate than this sketch suggests, do not arise from its complexity, although there is the weakness of summation, of an attempt to reconcile long accounts in shorthand. More problematic are the long, dull sections of "What One Loves," particularly "The Travel Sack" and "Aegeodrome." The former inventories a personal museum of Elytis' favorite masterpieces, right down to the Kochel numbers of Mozart's works. If this is to escape pedantry, if by its flatness we are meant to see the inadequacy of high culture in balance against injustice, we have a clear example of the fallacy of imitative form. Likewise with the lifeless lexicon of "Aegeodrome." Furthermore, the overall metaphor of journey and return produces too little sense of motion to raise it above the triteness and limpness of convention. And the central image of innocent sexuality is shaded at times by voyeurism.

Elytis' verse can excite the verbal imagination. His imitations of Greek epigraphy and of Sappho generate ambiguity at several levels, even about the identity of individual words; the second plays fully with Sapphic lacunae. Whatever form Broumas' pun on the "Greek state" takes in the original, it wonderfully encapsulates the forces pitted against each other.

Despite his inclusion of Mozart et al., however, Elytis' "Greek state" is no symbol for Western culture. Europeans, never mind Americans, will sense a call for Greek cultural hegemony ("a lost Greek empire. For the sake of language, not anything else"), a hope that "Even the Franks might Hellenize," and admiration for a "small Alexander the Great."