Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy

Volume 39, 2018

Philosophy and Literature

The ‘Dialogue’ between Odysseus Elytis and Henry Corbin

This paper aims at presenting the relationship of the poet Odysseus Elytis with the French philosopher Henry Corbin as it is displayed through the poetic work of Elytis The light-tree and the fourteenth beauty. We study the notion of imagination in this poetic synthesis through the philosophical perspective of Corbin. Emphasis is given on the solar metaphysics and the element of transparency. We focus on a parallel reading of Elytis and Corbin in order to show in what ways poetry and philosophy can be related. Elytis (as Corbin’s theory goes) aims at passing on a third dimension of things or a third level of reality.