C. P. Cavafy

THE “HELLENIC” POET

Born on April 29, 1863 in Alexandria, Egypt, where he died on the same day in 1933, Constantine Cavafy is the leading poet of the periphery, writing in Greek far from Greek lands. The body of his poetry includes the 154 poems of the “canon”, 37 “repudiated poems”, most of which are juvenilia written in romantic katharevousa, 75 “hidden” poems that were found finished in his papers, and 30 “unfinished” poems. His poems often feature historical figures or creations of the poet’s imagination, with frequent references to familiar or less familiar elements of Homeric, Hellenistic, and Byzantine years. Today his poetry comprises a discrete pole in Greek literature, and he enjoys a prominent place in world literature as well.

CAVAFY AND HIS ERA

Cavafy was born in the Egypt of Ismail Pasha; the family then moved to England, where he lived from 1872 to 1877; in 1882 he spent over two years in Constantinople, a city to which all trade routes of the era led. He returned to Egypt after the country came under British rule following British and French competition. The civil services, the army, and the navy were all organized according to their respective British models. His life and work belong to an era that is “liminal” and transitional, just like those to which he turns in search of material—or, one might say, to an era of “decline.” The cosmopolitan dimension of his poetry also belongs to the period during which European modernism emerges, with the appearance of figures such as Joseph Conrad, Thomas Mann, and E. M. Forster, the last of whom became a personal friend of C. P. Cavafy and tried to promote his poetry in the Anglophone literary world.