Poetry Criticism | Cavafy, Constantine - C. M. Bowra (essay date 1967)

C. M. Bowra (essay date 1967)

SOURCE: “Constantine Cavafy and the Greek Past,” in The Creative Experiment, Macmillan, 1967, pp. 29-60.

[In the following excerpt, Bowra discusses Cavafy's unusual relationship to Greek culture and his life in Alexandria, arguing that his best poetry attests to his individuality.]

The Greek poet, Constantine Cavafy, who was born in 1868 and spent most of his time in Alexandria until his death in 1933, presents a special case, both as a man and as a poet, of one whose situation cut him off from much of contemporary life and from any immediate or easy connection with a civilised past. His case is not unique, and the United States has more than once shown that it cannot always give to its writers a secure sense of an established background, with the result that they have settled in Europe and tried to make themselves at home by re-establishing broken ties with old traditions of race and language. What Henry...

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