[A letter from Odysseus Elytis to Yorgos Theotokas]
...(3) I now come, further down, to the relationship between Surrealism and Romanticism, the 'ultimate Romanticism', that as you say the former represents. I do not doubt it since it is the truth, since its own supporters accept it and profess it. I'm afraid though that this phrase of ours will be misunderstood here, and you will see that everybody will be repeating it in a sallow and insufferable way. Because it provides them with a convenient mould that will contain all their concerns and offer them a numbing solution. They will be talking about a new Romanticism, as they do about a new Classicism, and, in their conception, this difference will be limited to a transfer across time of one and the same phenomenon. The terrible, the deep, the radically revolutionary content of this new Romanticism, adjusted to modern man, will be put light-heartedly in the margin.

(4) You also note, my dear Theotokas, that you do not believe at all in the future of automatic writing and nightmarish painting. But neither do I believe in it, and here is a point where I disagree with my friend Andreas Embeirikos. Surrealism passed through automatic writing, but ended up forming a new kind of comprehension and, therefore, a new way of thinking about expression in harmony with what we could call lucidity of feeling.
Everybody has more or less gone beyond automatism. I have seen manuscripts by Eluard with many corrections and I know that Tzara even uses dictionaries. This is of no importance. Nor do I want you to think that I don't believe in the 'fact' of automatic writing and its effectiveness. And I say this because many are wary, even you yourself, as I remember you telling me about Embeirikos. However, I can assure you that many poems published lately by Embeirikos were written before my eyes 'd' un jet', as they say, and I myself have written plenty of similar poems before my friends, with the difference that I have never had them published and never will, because I simply think that to this glorious material a deliberate intervention, if you will, is always needed, to eliminate snags and direct the flow from one point to another. This alone is something for which the Surrealists would never accept me.

(Excerpt from a letter of Odysseus Elytis to Yorgos Theotokas, 1938, paragraph 4)