Poetry Criticism | Cavafy, Constantine - Kimon Friar (essay date 1973)

Kimon Friar (essay date 1973)

SOURCE: “Constantine Caváfis,” in Modern Greek Poetry, edited by Kimon Friar, Simon and Schuster, 1973, pp. 22-27.

[In the following essay, Friar discusses the characteristics of Cavafy's poetry, ranking his historical poems as his best.]

Kostís Palamás was to cast his shadow over most Greek poets during the first decades of the twentieth century, but it was his younger (by four years) contemporary Cónstantine Caváfis who, although not very well known in Greece proper until the middle thirties, was ultimately to challenge and overwhelm him as the true predecessor of modern poetry. Caváfis was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1863, and died there in 1933. But for seven formative years (between the ages of nine and sixteen) spent in England, two years in Constantinople, four brief visits to Athens lasting, all told, less than a year, and one visit to Paris, he spent his entire life in that mythological...

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