Peter Green
Cavafy : The supreme modern poet of nostalgia

Page 4

He hated growing old (though the laryngeal cancer that killed him was due to his lifelong addiction to cigarettes). Even his earliest poems testify to this obsession. He persisted in handing out photographs of himself taken years before. He dyed his hair. The melancholy that he ascribes to a fictitious poet in Commagene in the year 595--"The aging of my body and my looks/is a wound from a terrible knife"--must surely reflect his own pain, and the transient, youth-obsessed nature of the relationships he so memorably celebrated. And the poem's end--"Bring on your drugs, Art of Poetry,/which make it impossible--for a while--to feel the wound"--reveals, with stoic clarity, one of the driving forces behind his work. Seferis contended that outside his poetry Cavafy was completely uninteresting, did not exist, and Mendelsohn's investigation of the poet's life leads him to a very similar conclusion. Yet at least in a psychological sense, Cavafy's life is surely one of extraordinary interest, and not only because of the poetry it generated.

The traditional account of Cavafy's literary development, sketched out by Seferis and largely followed by Mendelsohn, goes like this. As an eager young litterateur and Orthodox Christian, overly conscious of his Phanariot ancestry, well read in Hellenistic and Byzantine history, writing reviews and essays as well as verse, and struggling to find his own poetic voice, Cavafy was an ordinary and even undistinguished figure. Heavily influenced by the Parnassian movement of the 1860s onward, he embraced the cause of Art for Art's Sake (a concept he never abandoned), and particularly its harking back to ancient Mediterranean models. Then came Baudelaire and Symbolism, the idea of the poet as belonging to a rarefied and enchanted elite, and the mild dottiness (shared by Yeats) that dabbled in second sight, telepathy, and extrasensory perception. The aestheticism of the Esoterics and the Decadents added an exotic relish, and encouraged Cavafy's anti-industrial, retrospective nostalgia for the past.

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Cf. Cavafy's poems - Bilingual versions, Mendelsohn, Cavafy - Life of a Poet, Cavafy resources

More about New Hellenism / Constantinople

The Greek Word Library

Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/modern/cavafy-green.asp?pg=4