Daniel Mendelsohn
Cavafy : The Life of a Poet

Page 4

From the Parnassians it was but a short step to Baudelaire, a Greek translation of whose "Correspondences" constitutes part of one 1892 poem; and, ultimately, to Symbolism. It is not hard to see the allure that Baudelaire's elevation of the poet as a member of an elite—a gifted seer whose special perceptions were denied to the common mass—had for the young poet, in whom a rarefied taste for the past, as well as a necessarily secret taste for specialized erotic pleasures, coexisted. Lines from the second half of "Correspondences According to Baudelaire" suggest how thoroughly the young Alexandrian had absorbed the lessons of the pioneering French modernist:

Do not believe only what you see. The vision of poets is sharper still. To them, Nature is a familiar garden. In a shadowed paradise, those other people grope along the cruel road....

By the end of the 1890s he was experiencing a profound intellectual and artistic crisis precipitated by his engagement not with other poets, but with two historians. A series of reading notes on Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, made between 1893 and 1899, indicates a serious ongoing engagement with the great Enlightenment historian.

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Cf. Cavafy's poems - Bilingual versions, Green, Cavafy - The supreme modern poet of nostalgia, Cavafy in print, Cavafy resources

More about New Hellenism / Constantinople

The Greek Word Library

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