CP Cavafy: The Complete Poems – review | Poetry. When Constantine Cavafy died on 29 April 1933, his 70th birthday, his work was little known beyond Greece and Alexandria, where he spent most of his life. In 1935, with the publication of the first substantial collection of his poems, he began to receive the critical attention his genius merited. His foremost, lasting admirer was another great Greek poet, George Seferis, who observed: "Outside his poetry Cavafy does not exist. " That was in 1946, when several of Cavafy's friends and acquaintances were still alive. Yet the remark is not a harsh one, because the artist he was referring to was the least self-assertive of men. He was fluent in three languages besides his own – English, French and Italian – and enjoyed reading detective stories when he wasn't immersed in the classic Greek and Latin texts that had captured his quizzical and ironic imagination from an early age. Let me cite two versions of a single poem "One Night", which was started in 1907 and completed in 1916:
The Paris Review - Cavafy’s Bed - The Paris Review. GREEK POEM H POLIS by K P CAVAFY READ BY ELLi LAMBETi. DMendelsohn1960 : Have been thinking of this... DMendelsohn1960 : This afternoon's "afternoon... C.P. Cavafy - Poems - Hidden. Bibliophilia / Reading Mendelsohn's #Cavafy on a May Evening by Dr John2005, via Flickr. Reading Mendelsohn's #Cavafy on a May Evening. C.P. Cavafy - The Official Website of The Cavafy Archive. KDPG Books. Daniel Mendelsohn. ‘As Good as Great Poetry Gets’ by Daniel Mendelsohn. “Outside his poems Cavafy does not exist.” Seventy-five years after the death of “the Alexandrian” (as he is known in Greece), the early verdict of his fellow poet George Seferis—which must have seemed rather harsh in 1946, when the Constantine Cavafy who had existed in flesh and blood was still a living memory for many people—seems only to gain in validity.
That flesh-and-blood existence was, after all, fairly unremarkable: a middling job as a government bureaucrat, a modest, even parsimonious routine, no great fame or recognition until relatively late (and even then hardly great), a private life of homosexual encounters kept so discreet that even today its content, as much as there was content, remains largely unknown to us. As the man and everyone who knew him have passed into history, the contrast between the life and the art has made it easy to think of Cavafy in the abstract, as an artist whose work exists untethered to a specific moment in time. Myres: Alexandria in 340 AD by Constantine Cavafy.