1935 Gives the famous lecture On surrealism in Athens and publishes Blast furnace; a pure surrealist text.
1940 Gets married with poet Matsi Hatzilazarou; nevertheless, they divorced four years later. The same year he divorced, despite his leftist sympathies, he was taken hostage by the communistOPLA after the Dekemvriana events in Athens and was treated in a humiliating way. On the road he managed to escape.
1947 Gets married for the second time with Vivika Zisi. A year later, his father, with whom Embeirikos' relationship was rather normal, dies in Geneva.
1962 Together with Yorgos Theotokas and Odysseas Elytis, he was invited to travel to the USSR by the "Greco-Soviet" Union; the trip inspired him to write the poem ES ES ES ER Rossia.
1975 He dies in Kifissia; his mother preceded him by only two years.
Poetry
His poetry can be defined by two major tendencies. On the one hand, he was one of the major representatives of surrealism in Greece. His first poetic collection, Ipsikaminos, was a hereticbook, characterized by the lack of the punctuation and the peculiarity of the language. As the poet himself admitted it was precisely the originality and extravagance of his work that contributed to his relative commercial success. On the other hand, together with Yorgos Seferis, Embirikos was the most important representative of the ":de:Generation der 30er Jahre|Generation of the '30s". He contributed greatly to the introduction of modernism in Greek letters and he helped change once and for all the poetic atmosphere of Greece.
''Megas Anatolikos''
Α significant work by Embirikos is his pornographic novelMegas Anatolikos written between 1940–c. 1970 and published only after his death in 1990. In this work, Embirikos narrates the first trip of the ocean liner Great Eastern from England to America. Embirikos describes the Great Eastern as a hedonic vessel, where the multitude of the passengers enjoy love without and beyond limits. During the ten-day trip they discover a new form of happiness and innocence. For this work, Odysseas Elytis called Embirikos "a visionary and a prophet".
Literary critic
Embirikos also wrote articles of literary criticism; at least two of them are worth-mentioning. The first is "The hidden necrophilia in the works of Edgar Allan Poe"; the second, "Nikos Engonopoulos or the miracle of Elbassan and Bosphorus".
Photography
Embirikos was an enthusiastic photographer all his life, and the sheer volume of his photographic work, no less than his passionate involvement with the medium, suggest that it was, for him, very nearly as important an activity as writing. Yiorgis Yiatromanolakis, Embirikos's principal Greek scholar, has written that "his three principal identities are those of a poet, a novelist and a photographer". For his part, Embirikos's son, Leonidas, has referred to his father's "vast, vertiginously extensive photographic archive... the negatives alone exceeding 30,000 items". Embirikos only ever publicly exhibited his photographs once in his lifetime, showing a limited number of prints at the Ilissos gallery in Athens, in 1955. However, as part of the celebrations for the centenary of his birth in 2001, the photographer and critic John Stathatos was commissioned to research the archive and curate a large exhibition at the Technopolis Arts Centre in Athens. A substantial monograph incorporating Stathatos's text was simultaneously published by Agra Editions.
