During his lifetime, Yehuda Amichai, who died on September 22nd aged 76, resisted the appellation, "national poet of Israel"; now that he is dead, he cannot escape that title.
His idioms have seeped into everyday Israeli parlance; bereaved mothers recite his poems at the graves of war-dead sons; operas and rock songs use his lyrics. Many hailed him as a seer, who understood his nation's innermost hopes and fears. Collections of his Hebrew verse repeatedly topped best-seller lists.
Nor was his appeal limited to Israel. Universities from Oxford to Asyut, in Egypt, feted him with honours. Many of his 16 anthologies, and several novels, plays, short stories and essays have been printed into 33 other languages.
Yehuda Amichai dealt with weighty issues - God, death, loss, the fate of nations. Yet he did so with a comic eye for detail, elevating the commonplace to the plane of mythic metaphor. Sheets flapping in the midday Jerusalem breeze become flags of contending tribes; a girl opening a refrigerator door is illuminated in "the light of another world"; teenage conscripts sent to the battlefront peer out of coach windows like "faded postage stamps".
While serving with the British army in north Africa during the second World War, a ferocious sandstorm overturned a mobile library. Yehuda Amichai salvaged an anthology of Auden and Eliot verse, and was instantly smitten. Auden later became a friend and mentor. So did Ted Hughes, who wrote: "Amichai is the poet whose books I open most often. [They] make my life available to me afresh, uncover all kinds of riches and free me from my mental prisons."
Yehuda Amichai's own childhood was marked by a more literal escape. Born in Wurzburg, Germany, to middle-class Jewish parents, he was 12 when his family fled the Nazis and settled in Palestine. They changed their surname from Pfeuffer to Amichai.
In 1946, he joined the Zionist Palmach regiment, and fought in the Negev Desert two years later.
A year before graduating from the Hebrew University in literature and biblical studies, he published his first collection, Ahshav u-be'yamim ha'aherim (Now And In Other Days, 1955). It revolutionised Israeli poetry. Shunning the formalism of pre-state poets, he introduced slang and prosaic modern terms to liberate Hebrew, "this weary language torn from its sleep in the Bible". His words elide seamlessly from biblical phraseology to 20th-century banality: "The man under his fig tree telephoned the man under his vine."
From early on, he rejected his parents' orthodoxy. Yet the metre of holy texts still rang in his ears and echoed in his writing. Sometimes, he railed against a "toothless" or "merciless" God, who had deserted mankind. Mostly, though, his poems are affectionately irreverent. One likens the weekly Torah recital to reading God bedtime stories. Another has the Prophet Jacob climb his ladder to become a window-cleaner to celestial VIPs.
During the days of the British mandate in Palestine, he ferried Jewish refugees into the country, ran guns for the embryonic Israeli army, and later served in three wars. However, he was always a critical Zionist. He opposed triumphalism and campaigned against Israel's Lebanese war.
One poem undermines the David v Goliath motif. While David's comrades whoop with joy at his victory, the hero feels shame at carrying Goliath's gory severed head. In another deliberately shocking image, he has Jews begging forgiveness outside an Arab shop on Yom Kippur.
He longed for peace - not so much heavenly bliss, just normality and human affection. His love poems, invariably dedicated to his second wife, Hanna Sokolov, reveal a fascination with the world of women. He once portrayed his mother as an old wind- mill/ Two hands always raised to scream to the sky/ And two descending to make sandwiches.
Unlike secular intellectuals who preferred modern Tel Aviv, he adored Jerusalem, "short and crouched among its hills", its air "filled with prayers and dreams, hard to breathe".
A teacher at the Hebrew University, he lived within sight of the ancient city walls, and, at times, felt oppressed by the weight of its history - "even the dead are granted the right to vote". Still, there was room for hope. He knew all Jerusalem's myriad alleyways, and felt sure peace would emerge from one of them.
Yehuda Amichai always remained approachable and down-to-earth, even after winning the Israel Prize for Literature in 1982. He asserted the authenticity of the individual in a society where collectivism - both religious and secular - runs deep. "The entire task of an intellectual is to allow one the right to doubt," he wrote.
Not that he lacked detractors. Some criticised him for retreading earlier ideas. Yet Open Closed Open, written in 1997 and translated into English earlier this year, is being hailed as his masterpiece. From it comes what could well be his epitaph. "All my life I played chess with myself and others. Now [the pieces] are all jumbled together. The game is calm and has no end, no winners, no losers, the hollow rules clang in the wind. I listen. And I am quiet. In my life and in my death."
Yehuda Amichai is survived by his wife and three children.
Yehuda Amichai: born 1924; died, September 2000