Odysseas Elytis and K.G. Karyotakis: I know him no longer. ..?

Although he often gave the impression that he rejected K.G. Karyotakis's life-attitude and aesthetic choices, Odysseas Elytis assimilated the older poet's achievements into his own poetry; he also embraced the deeper vision of Karyotakis, a vision that the suicide poet did not manage to maintain himself, defeated as he was by pain and sorrow. On a surface level, Elytis is a son or, better yet, a younger brother of Karyotakis; his "anxiety of influence" urged him against his older brother in an "agon" that is very similar in character to the literary battles among poets described by Harold Bloom. On a deeper level, and irrespective of any considerations of influence or reaction to that influence, Elytis's early poetry is distinctly marked by the poetic presence of Karyotakis, and his later poetry shows his perfect assimilation of the poetic achievements of the older poet into the system that constitutes his own poetics.