Peter Green
Cavafy : The supreme modern poet of nostalgia

Page 5

But then, in Seferis's words, "something extraordinary happens." With so private a person it is hard to be specific, but it would seem that from about 1890 onward Cavafy was struggling with a number of internal conflicts, intellectual, emotional, and erotic. He had begun to read Gibbon, whose humanist ironies attracted him, but whose contempt for Byzantium and its religion he found profoundly antipathetic. He was undergoing a sexual crisis--perhaps precipitated in part by the death of his mother (the same period witnessed the deaths of half a dozen other relatives, as well as those of two good friends)--which resulted, from about 1916 onward, in a far more open and explicit treatment of homosexuality in his work.

This psychological turning point, dated by Cavafy himself to 1911, had been preceded by a ruthless pruning and weeding out, based on what he termed a "philosophic scrutiny," of his existing work. Cavafy now repudiated many of his early pieces, or at best allowed them to survive unpublished. (Mendelsohn, ignoring Cavafy's verdict, has included them all, the repudiated as well as the unpublished.) It was at this moment, we are told, that Cavafy, as a poet, rose from mediocrity to greatness. Hitherto, the argument runs, he had been just another fin de siecle literary versifier, with strong, if deeply concealed, Wildean passions. A comparison is regularly made with Proust, who, in Mendelsohn's words, "similarly underwent a profound but invisible metamorphosis that, by his late forties, had transformed him from a dabbling litterateur into a major artist."

This parallel is reinforced by the undoubted truth--Mendelsohn is absolutely right here--that, as with Proust, "Cavafy's one great subject, the element that unites virtually all of his work, is Time." But otherwise the notion of Cavafy re-inventing himself in middle age (he was almost fifty in 1911) comes up against an interesting and significant obstacle. There is fairly general agreement as to what constitute his best, and best-known, poems: the lists will almost always include "The City" (1894), "Waiting for the Barbarians" (1898), "Thermopylae" (1901), "Ithaca" (1910), "The God Abandons Antony" (1910), and "Alexandrian Kings" (1912). The only possible later poem that might qualify for entry to this list is "Young Men of Sidon (400 A.D.)" (1920), and even that is debatable. In other words, most of the poems for which Cavafy has become famous were conceived before the metamorphosis that allegedly turned him into a great poet.

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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=5