Born in Crete to a Lesvos family of soap manufacturers. He studied law in the University of Athens and, in 1940, he served as an army lieutenant on the Albanian front during the Greek-Italian war. He first published his poetry in 1935 in "Nea Grammata", a literary magazine, which brought to Greece works from the European contemporary literary scene and became the intellectual medium of the 30's generation. He celebrated the Aegean, its light, color and happiness. His influence derives from the Surrealists, although he never composed a truly surrealistic work but he incorporated its dynamic elements, taming its absolute freedom under his impeccable aesthetic principles, thus creating poems of superb quality. One of the elements he totally accepted was that of the value of the senses -not of the intellect- in the perception and understanding of the world. The world for him is Greece and its nature, the Aegean islands, the sea and the sky with its bright sun. And within this world he savors the images, the sounds, the smells that his senses grasp. In his poems, he exposes the immense value of the simple things of everyday life, the elements of nature. Parallel to this, he sings love as the source of happiness and completion. His main work -published in 1959- is "Axion Esti", a poem that attempts to identify the vital elements in Greece's 3000 year old history and tradition and where the Orthodox liturgy blends with the images of the sun, the sea, and the Christian element with the pagan. Always believing that poetry is written with words and not with ideas, he emphasizes the value of the language, using either unused or common words, giving them a new dimension. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1979 for his poetry which, against the background of Greek tradition, depicts with sensuous strength and intellectual lucidity modern man's struggle for freedom and creativity.