The Axion Esti

Odysseus Elytis

"The Axion Esti" (Worthy It Is) was composed in 959 and it is a synthetic poem, written by our novelist Odysseus Elytis.

During and after the Greek Civil War, he lapsed into literary silence for almost 15  years, returning to print in 1959 with "The AXion Esti", a long poem in which the speaker explores the essence of his being as well as the identity of his country and people.

Widely held to be his chef d'oeuvre, it is a poetic cycle of alternating prose and verse patterned after the ancient Byzantine liturgy.

Elytis depicted the Greek reality through an intensely personal tone. "The Axion Esti" can perhaps be taken best as a kind of spiritual autobiography that attempts to dramatize the national and  philosophical extensions of the poet's personal sensibility.

Elytis presents an image of the contemporary Greek consciousness through the developing of a person that is at once the poet himself and the voice of his country.

The Axion Esti has the structure of a pyramid. The levels that define it are:

1. Elytis as a poet and his poetic fate
2. The place of history (of Hellenism and its dramatic survival)
3. The space of metaphysics (man between heaven and earth)

The poet defeats his enemies by identifying himself with Greek land and history. Hellenism is saved and justified by its culture, virtue and ability.

It is divided into three parts:

1. Genesis, where the birth of the poet and the Greek world is recorded poetically
2. Passions, where the passions of Greece and the poet are intertwined in World War II.
3. Doxastic, which iss a doxology of the Greek World/landscape.

More specifically in Genesis, in seven hymns, corresponding to the seven days of Creation, commemorates the birth of the poet and the light, the creation of the earth with the image of the Greek landscape, the creation of the sea and islands, the small creatures of life, of girls and love.

Passions, 18 psalms, 12 chants, and 6 written in prose, in three sections, refer to the relation of freedom and language, to the struggles for the freedom of the poet and the Greeks, to slavery, to Occupation in World War II and struggles against it, to death and faith in our roots.

Doxastic is the almination of the composition. The worls is praised by the little one (the sea landscape, the island and the winds, the girls at the teenage slut of adolescence) as a bridge that will lead to the mega (great) world.