Daniel Mendelsohn
Cavafy : The Life of a Poet

Page 5

The exasperated rejection of Gibbon's disdainful view of Byzantium and Christianity that we find in those notes betrays the strong influence exerted by the contemporary Greek historian Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, whose History of the Greek Nation expounded a coherent Greek identity continuing unbroken from ancient to Byzantine to modern times. It was Cavafy's reading in these two historians that led him to reject his earlier, rather facile use of history as merely the vehicle for bejeweled verses in the Parnassian mode on "Ancient Days" (one of the thematic headings into which he'd group his poems: others were "The Beginnings of Christianity," "Passions," and "Prisons"), and inspired him to try to combine history and poetry in a more intellectually and aesthetically serious way.

This intellectual crisis coincided with a devastating series of deaths of friends and family members throughout the same decade (his two closest friends, three of his six brothers, an uncle, his mother, and his maternal grandfather would all die between 1886 and 1902) and with what he obscurely referred to as a "crisis of lasciviousness," which may or may not have had something to do with his intense attraction to a young playwright whom he met during a trip to Athens at the turn of the century.

Together, these cerebral, emotional, and erotic upheavals culminated in a dramatic reappraisal of his life's work thus far: the "Philosophical Scrutiny" of 1902–1903, to which the poet, as he turned forty, ruthlessly subjected all of his poems written up to that point, both unpublished and published. (Hence the later appellation "Repudiated" for a group of poems he'd already published by that time and subsequently rejected.)

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

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Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/modern/cavafy-mendelsohn.asp?pg=5