Cavafy, Constantine | Petroula Kephala Ruehlen (essay date 1965)
Petroula Kephala Ruehlen (essay date 1965)
SOURCE: “Constantine Cavafy: A European Poet,” in Nine Essays in Modern Literature, edited by Donald E. Stanford, Louisiana State University Press, 1965, pp. 36-62.
[In the following essay, Ruehlen posits that Cavafy was a European poet because of his firm grounding in Western culture and his continued relevance to European readers.]
On the twenty-ninth of April 1933, Constantine Cavafy died on his seventieth birthday. A few days before, he had jotted down for a friend to read—cancer of the throat had deprived the poet of the ability to speak—“And I had twenty-five more poems to write!”
In 1963 Greece, the world, celebrated the centennial of Cavafy's birth and the thirtieth anniversary of his death. A tasteful new edition of his poems, by G. P. Savidis, has marked the occasion.1 This new edition follows (for the first time) the scheme set out by the poet himself for...
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