Peter Green
Cavafy : The supreme modern poet of nostalgia

Page 9

Cavafy is the supreme modern poet of nostalgia, of the brevity and the transience of all human aspirations and affections. More stoic than Thomas Nashe, he knows brightness will fall from the air, but sets himself to catch it in a ring of words before it fades.

When we survey Cavafy's wide-ranging historical and religious themes, a very interesting fact emerges. He is regularly described as a marginalist. Seferis, again, set the tone: "His world is located on the edges of places, men, and ages." But in a literary sense he began at the familiar center, and only progressively moved further out. Odysseus and Ithaca, Achilles' horses, the death of Sarpedon, a Trojan lament: all these would be familiar to readers of Homer (the repudiated poems contain similar items). His first expansion into the Hellenistic world came by way of Plutarch's Lives, still reasonably familiar territory for the educated. But the more the voracious autodidact explored the world of the Seleucids and Ptolemies, and the medieval byways of Byzantinism (surely the most esoteric subject matter out of which great poetry was ever made), and what he described in "Philhellene" (1912) as the dubiously Hellenic regions "behind the Zagros, beyond Phraata," the further he departed from any mythic or historical context immediately appreciable by the non- specialist, and the longer and more frequent Mendelsohn's excellent explanatory notes have to grow, sometimes morphing into extended commentaries.

Except when these later poems have a touch of emotional universalism--as in, say, the use of colored glass for jewels at the coronation of the penniless John Kantakouzenos--they are not the stuff that generates worldwide popularity. It seems increasingly clear that what first established Cavafy's extraordinary reputation was a nexus of his famous early poems, and what confirmed it was his unique new genre of homoerotic vignettes, some of the best of which have emerged, comparatively recently, from the unpublished and unfinished work that he left behind at his death.

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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=9