November 2, 1911

The renowned poet Odysseas Elytēs (November 2, 1911 to March 18, 1996) is less familiar to English readers. He was a prolific writer and his bibliography can be studied here. In the volume What I love: selected poems of Odysseas Elytis (1986), we find these lines:


On the wall, the Mermaid with unplaited hair
The cat who saw us in the dark
Child with frankincense and red cross In the hour of dusk by the unapproachable boulders
......


There is some biographical date at the Nobel Prize for Literature site, (the source of 

Wikipedia's information): 

....In 1937 he visited the Reserve Officer's Cadet School in Corfu. Upon the outbreak of the war he served in the rank of Second Lieutenant, first at the Headquarters of the 1st Army Corps and then at the 24th Regiment, on the advanced fire line. During the German occupation and later, after Greece was liberated, he has been unabatedly active, publishing successive collections of poetry and writing essays concerning contemporary poetry and art problems.

...
In 1961, upon an invitation of the State Department, he traveled through the U.S.A.; and - upon similar invitations - through the Soviet Union in 1963 and Bulgaria in 1965.....

Elytis' poetry has marked, through an active presence of over forty years, a broad spectrum. Unlike others, he did not turn back to Ancient Greece or Byzantium but devoted himself exclusively to today's Hellenism, of which he attempted - in a certain way based on psychical and sentimental aspects - to build up the mythology and the institutions. His main endeavour has been to rid his people's conscience from remorses unjustifiable, to complement natural elements through ethical powers, to achieve the highest possible transparency in expression and to finally succeed in approaching the mystery of light, "the metaphysic of the sun" - according to his own definition. .....