C. P. Cavafy

...in his lifetime he was a modest civil servant; his poems went unrecognized until late in his career. --Carmela Ciuraro, Paging Through: Poems, McClatchy News Service, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, April 26, 2009, review of Collected Poems, and The Unfinished Poems, by C. P. Cavafy, translated by Daniel Mendelsohn


Recommended reading:
by C. P. Cavafy at Reading Rat


Criticism (articles, essays, reviews):

"A Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe." With this sentence the novelist E. M. Forster introduced the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy to the English-speaking world in 1919. --James Longenbach, A Poet’s Progress, The New York Times, April 17, 2009, review of Collected Poems, by C. P. Cavafy, translated by Daniel Mendelsohn, and The Unfinished Poems, by C. P. Cavafy, translated by Daniel Mendelsohn

Surely it is to misunderstand the melancholy of Cavafy to believe that a Golden Age once existed or could ever have existed, human life being what it is. But certainly Cavafy, who is usually described as having lived in poverty, lived in an age in which, to judge from the well-proportioned, high-ceilinged rooms of his flat, luxurious (or perhaps I should say luxuriant) poverty was possible, as it is not now: such luxuriance no doubt having been dependent upon the existence of a deep social stratum of even greater impoverishment. A rise in general wealth renders impossible impoverishment in its genteel form. --Theodore Dalrymple, Cliquez ici for Alexandria, The New Criterion, March 2003