Writing for a national listenership: Odysseus Elytis’ <i>Alvaniada</i> as a radio poem

This article revisits Odysseus Elytis’ poem Alvaniada , first presented on the Greek National Radio Foundation (EIR) in 1956. I approach the Alvaniada as a radio poem, highlighting its role in the development of Elytis’ intermedial poetics, which aims at inventing, in his own words, ‘new fixed forms that facilitate the poem's transition from the domain of the book to the domain of the theatre or to music and song’. The case of the Alvaniada directs attention to the 1950s as a critical, yet understudied, decade for Elytis’ acquisition of canonical status: it was then that his works became widely disseminated via national cultural institutions such as the state theatre and radio.