Papayiotis (Takis) Papatsonis was born into an aristocratic family on 30 January 1895 in Athens. Most of Papatsonis’s adult life was spent in the Ministry of Economics which he joined in 1914 as deputy chairman of the Commercial Bank of Greece. A visionary and a mystic, his poetic career extends from 1913 to 1976, although the period from 1930 to 1950 contains the bulk of his most important poetry and prose. It was during these years that he produced over half of his entire poetic output and almost two-thirds of the poetry he considered worthy of inclusion in his two volumes of collected poems. In 1967, with his election to the Academy of Athens, he was awarded the highest position a literary man may fill in Greece. Papatsonis died in Athens on 26 July 1976.