The Complete Poems by Constantinos P. Cavafy

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Cavafy was an important Greek poet during the first three decades of the twentieth century, who influenced E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot and others in the English speaking world. I encountered his name off and on studying those writers when I was in college, but I've only just now found the time to read his work.

He was born and lived most of his life in Alexandria, which somehow seems appropriate: a Greek living in a Greek city in a foreign land?

Cavafy was an advocate of demotic Greek (think democratic). Perhaps this was influenced by an early study of Dante. Likely, this became part of his mystic. By this point, writing in the vernacular seems hardly revolutionary.



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