I am not going to suggest that Constantine Cavafy and Thomas Eliot are bound together by any bonds of influence. They are too widely separated by the years—almost a whole generation. Cavafy was born in Alexandria in 1863; Eliot in St. Louis in 1888. When Eliot is still at the starting point of his orientation—about 1920, with his “Gerontion,” I believe—Cavafy has already published the poems which reveal his basic characteristics.¹

To be more precise, I do not mean that the Cavafy of this period is already his full self. On the contrary, with Cavafy something very extraordinary happens. In the poems of his youth and even certain poems of his middle age he quite often appears ordinary and lacking in any great distinction. But in the poems of his old age he gives the impression that he is constantly discovering things that are new and very valuable. He is “a poet of old age.” A few months before his death, when he was ill in Athens, he is reported to have said, “I still have twenty-five poems to write.” It is sad that he was not able to write even two, even just one, of these poems. It is a strange and rare thing: he died at seventy, but he left us with the bitter curiosity we feel about a man who has been lost to us in the prime of life. But it is impossible to maintain that Cavafy was at all influenced by Eliot, even during this last period, from 1920 to 1933. As I said, Cavafy is always discovering things, but his discoveries are made only along that lonely path which he follows himself. So far as my own knowledge of literature goes, I know of no other poetry so isolated as his. From many aspects—and this is one of them—he appears as a boundary mark or limit. He remains outside the great thoroughfare that was opened to us by Solomos, and at the same time he appears to have no connection whatsoever with any European figure of his own generation or before his time. There is, I mean, no close affinity which affects his work organically. The only thing I observe here is that Cavafy has certainly breathed the atmosphere of contemporary European poetry as it was when he was between twenty and thirty-five years of age. That is, the atmosphere of the school of Symbolism from which have sprung the most important and the most dissimilar figures in prewar poetry. But he does not show the influence of any one specific writer; the marks of this school which he retains are merely the general characteristics of his generation and they soon fade away or, as his work progresses and his first attempts are left behind, take on a completely personal and individual tone.

Now to look at Eliot—the first point to notice is that the two poets are separated by the barrier of language. Our poetry keeps alive a language that is glorious and was once ecumenical; if we survey it from its heights, it deserves our attention and it is worthy of itself; and yet it cannot communicate with European literature. In between there is a great gulf fixed, the gulf of language. The rarest thing in the world is a foreign man of letters (I mean man of letters, not scholar) who knows Greek. Then too, according to the general view of foreigners, and no doubt of many Greeks too, classical Greece, Byzantine Greece and modern Greece are disconnected and independent countries; and everyone confines himself to his special subject. It is not till about the time of the beginning of the last war that we begin to observe the formation of a rather hazy consciousness that Greece is indeed a whole and that we find young people from foreign countries becoming interested in Greek poetry, not as some kind of study in linguistics but as a living art which is part of a living tradition.

So I think it very unlikely that Eliot could have been influenced by Cavafy; and in any case the question of influence does not seem to me important. What does interest me is the fact that one can, I think, legitimately speak about a parallel between the works of these poets, a parallel like the ones Plutarch wrote about—between, for instance Demetrius Poliorketes and Marc Antony, two perfectly different people; or, even better, as we speak in navigation of places which are on the same parallel and have the same climate, although they are on separate points of the globe.

Before I continue, I should like to point out the following:

• (1) In speaking of Eliot's poetry I shall take most of my examples from “The Waste Land,” which is, apart altogether from its value and its meaning as a symbol in modern literature, the most lapidary expression of the poet's critical ideas.
• (2) I shall try to see how these critical ideas of Eliot apply to the work of Cavafy and how Cavafy stands up to these ideas. Here there is a difficulty; for while Eliot is not only the most important poet writing in English but also a distinguished essayist, critic and lecturer, Cavafy, all through his life, wrote nothing except poetry. The critical maxims which he has left us are negligible, and even these we owe to notes made by his friends—or ex-friends—which should be read with great care and circumspection. So, while we know very well the ideas and the poetics of Eliot, we can only learn the ideas and poetics of Cavafy by listening very carefully to his poetry. We all call Cavafy an Alexandrian. The epithet, I think, could do with further definition. In my view, if there is any Alexandrian element in Cavafy it is this one: he resembles that old man of the Alexandrian sea who was constantly eluding the grasp, always changing his shape—the Proteus of Homer. …

• “Nor was the old man forgetful of his skill in deception. …” For this reason we should not only guard against our inclination to be swept away by the things which we like, but should also beware of taking at their face value the superficial meaning of the words of Cavafy or of his dialectical subterfuges.

• (3) My own view is that from a certain point onward—and I should place this point at about 1910—the work of Cavafy should be read and judged not as a series of separate poems, but as one and the same poem, a “work in progress” as James Joyce would have said, which is only terminated by death. Cavafy is, I think, the most “difficult” poet of contemporary Greece, and we shall understand him more easily if we read him with the feeling of the continuous presence of his work as a whole. This unity is his grace, and it is in this way that I shall approach him.

2

The poem of Cavafy that first made me think of Eliot was “Those Who Fought for the Achaean League”:

Valiant are you who fought and fell in glory;
fearless of those who were everywhere victorious.
If Diaios and Critolaus were at fault, you are blameless.
When the Greeks want to boast,
“Our nation turns out such men as these,” they will say
of you. So marvelous will be your praise—
Written in Alexandria by an Achaean;
In the seventh year of Ptolemy Lathyrus.

—A brilliant epigram. The first six lines have something of the metal of Simonides:

These on their own dear country conferred unquenchable glory,
Taking upon themselves the darkening cloud of death.

They made me reflect upon the remarkable unity of the Greek Anthology, which, as has been observed, contains poems written over a period of about a thousand years and yet forms a whole, the newer poems merely adding something of their own to the procession of the older ones. And so, I thought, after a chasm of so many years, here comes Cavafy to add his stone to the great building. My reaction was coldly literary. I was not interested in Cavafy at that time, or not particularly. My judgment, like that of most readers, passed over the last two lines in silence. What was the point of this tailpiece which merely seemed to get in the way?

Written in Alexandria by an Achaean,
In the seventh year of Ptolemy Lathyrus.

Years passed. One night in blacked-out Alexandria, a few days after the battle of Crete, I remembered the Achaean's epigram. It was tragically actual. Perhaps because of this, perhaps because I was in the city of the Ptolemies, I whispered over the whole poem to myself, together with its final cryptic lines. And then, suddenly and for the first time, I appreciated that the poem was written in 1922, on the eve of the catastrophe in Asia Minor;² and almost without thinking I reread these lines as:

Written in Alexandria by an Achaean,
The year that our race was destroyed.

Now it was no longer Cavafy leaping across a chasm of the ages to take his own place in the Greek Anthology; no longer a painter of cold, casual and Parnassian portraits; here instead was a contemporary of mine and one who had found the way to express his feelings with the greatest possible brevity and lucidity, one who was able to summon Simonides and the brilliant epitaphs of ancient days to leave their broken tombs and to come to me. It was a living presence, the presence that is felt too in the lines of Solomos on the destruction of the island of Psara.

This is my example. Let us use it to try to discover, even in a limited way, what Cavafy feels about time.

The first date given to us by the poem is that of the year when the Achaeans fell at Leucopetra, fighting the “everywhere victorious” Romans, who now abolish all traces of Greek independence. The year is 146 b.c. In Cavafy's poetry this date has a firm connection with two other previous events which he mentions elsewhere and which were disastrous for Hellenism. One of these events is the battle of Magnesia (190 b.c.), in which the Seleucid Antiochus the Great was utterly defeated by Scipio; and the other is the battle of Pydna (168 b.c.), in which Aemilius Paulus defeated the Macedonians and made an end of their power forever. This historical moment, about fifty years in length, is in the mind of the anonymous Achaean when he envisages the beautiful dead “as something holy which you approach in adoration,” and when he whispers: “If Diaios and Critolaus were at fault, you are blameless.”

The last generals of the Achaean League, Diaios and Critolaus, were undoubtedly at fault. The historian Paparrigopoulos in describing their behavior calls them “peddlars” of Hellenism, of mob rule and of facts. And Polybius notes that the saying “If we are not lost soon, we can never be saved” was on everybody's lips at this time.

The tree was rotten and had to be felled. The whole period is sick:

… Now desperation and grief.
The boys in Rome were right.
It is not possible for the dynasties to endure
that came out of the Macedonian Occupation.

[Of Demetrius Soter]

So speaks a disenchanted Seleucid, Demetrius, who bears a very close resemblance to this Achaean of ours. The vices which brought down in ruin the structure raised by Alexander were just as powerful as were the virtues themselves of the great Macedonian: perfidy, partiality, betrayal, political ineptitude, cunning, selfishness, bursts of temper alternating with servility. Here is Ptolemy going to Rome to ask for help against his brother:

Poorly dressed, humble, he entered Rome,
and lodged at the house of a little artisan.
And there he presented himself to the Senate
as a woebegone creature and as a pauper
so that he might beg with greater success.

[The Displeasures of the Son of Seleucus]

Or Philip V of Macedon, when he hears of the disaster at Magnesia in which his onetime ally, King Antiochus of Syria, was destroyed:

Philip, of course, will not postpone the feast.
However long his life's tedium has lasted,
one good thing he retains, his memory shows no lapse.
He recalls how much they wept in Syria, what sort of sorrow
they felt, when their Mother Macedonia became dirt. …

[The Battle of Magnesia]

Finally (and many other examples could be quoted) there is the occasion when the “young man of Antioch,” who has just the same tone of voice as the Achaean of the epigram, speaks to another king of Syria about the impending battle of Pydna. The young man speaks emotionally and impatiently; and the illustrious Antiochus, tongue-tied and timorous, looks round to see whether there is some eaves-dropper in the background.

It is this atmosphere which is emotionally identified by the poet with the atmosphere of 1922, just before “the destruction of the race.” And we know the frenetic insistence of Cavafy on his idea of “the race.” “I am not a Greek,” he said, “I am a Hellene.”

How does Cavafy bring these two periods together? He does it by introducing a connecting link, a third intermediary date, the seventh year (the last but one) of Ptolemy VIII, Lathyrus, 109 b.c. This also was a troubled period, a period of humiliation, decadence and never-ending intrigue, which culminated in the flight of Ptolemy from Alexandria, while omnipotent Rome is all the time drawing its web closer round the pitiful kingdom of the Lagids. This is the “present time” of the poet as he writes his epigram; and the writer of the epigram, in this seventh year of any Ptolemy Lathyrus, is Cavafy, is the nameless Achaean, is both of them together.

I hope you will forgive me for this somewhat scholastic excursion of mine. I shall go no further with it. There are some poets who write with accuracy and there are others who have no use for this quality. They are both right, though it must be admitted that those who belong to the second category are much easier to handle both for the critic and for the reader. However, though I could extend this inquiry further into other parts of Cavafy's work, I prefer to stop here for the time being. All I ask my reader to remember is this: that by alluding, almost imperceptibly, to the fault of Diaios and Critolaus and then to the seventh year of Ptolemy Lathyrus, Cavafy is able to identify the past with the present in a simultaneous moment. And this is a very different thing from the use of history which we normally find in the works of other poets, whether Romantic or Parnassian. It is no visual reminiscence, no reference to a vague mythology, no thematic treatment by the artist of “the beautiful” as seen in an icy and solitary piece of sculpture. Diaios, Critolaus, Philip, Demetrius, Ptolemy Lathyrus, the Achaean, are inside us, and inside us now; each of them could be you and I and everybody who has some consciousness of the evil and of the calamity.

And do not rely on the fact that in your life,
circumscribed, regulated and prosaic,
there are no such spectacular and terrifying things.
Perhaps at this very hour, Theodotus is entering
the well-appointed house of one of your neighbors—
invisible, bodiless—
carrying such a hideous head.

[Theodotus]

This is Cavafy whispering into our ear, very softly, very insistently; it is the dreadful head of Pompey, symbol of everyday horror, here, in the middle of our tidy way of life.

This is the mirror that the poet holds up to us. In it can be reflected those who are not “contented,” those who have the courage to look into it. It is the mirror of time; it is the feeling of time. To put it more simply—there is a feeling of temporal identification; past and present are united and with them, perhaps, the future as well. As Eliot says in one of his major poems:

Time present and time past
are both perhaps present in time future
and time future contained in time past.

“The Waste Land” of Eliot was written in 1922, between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the years preceding the next war. To simplify a great deal, it can be described as an epic of the decline of the world in which we are still living. It is founded on an archetypal myth, on the very ancient symbols of the changes in vegetation, of germination, of fertility; on the myth of the god who rises from the dead—Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Thammuz, Christ. The fertile element is water, the sterile element is dryness, and the purifying element is fire. “The Waste Land” is a present situation between hell and purgatory; the place of the drama is a contemporary big city, London, which is identified with other famous cities either in the past or present: Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna. The more specific symbols employed are those of a medieval legend from the cycle of the Holy Grail. There is the figure of the “Fisher-King,” whose physical decay extends to the whole of his kingdom, which has become a dried-up “Waste Land” where water does not flow, love is sterile, crops fail, and the animals do not reproduce—a condition that cannot change until the “pure Knight” brings from “the chapel perilous” the lance and the cup, the Holy Grail containing the ever-fresh blood of the Savior. If the Knight succeeds in his quest, rain will fall again, the waters will flow and fertility will return to the land. In Eliot's poem all the women represent love that is sterile, and all the men represent the dead god, except for one figure, Tiresias who “sees the essence of the poem,” who thus indeed represents the poet himself. It is in his person that the male and female principles are united.

Let us now look at a passage from the first part of the poem; it describes an encounter between the poet (or Tiresias) and “one I knew” in the city of London early in the morning.

          Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson!
“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
“Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
“You! hyprocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”

At the first reading these verses will seem much more cryptographical than Cavafy's verses on Ptolemy Lathyrus.

Apart from the untranslated verse from Baudelaire at the end, which strikes our hearing immediately, there are three other literary quotations; another one from Baudelaire, one from Dante, one from Webster's The White Devil; and there is a historical reference to the place name Mylae. Of course in approaching Eliot a wide factual knowledge is necessary. But, so as to avoid being distracted by details, let us examine just this historical reference.

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson!
“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout?”

Of course here we are dealing with the myth of the dead god. The corpse is the dead god, and the question is “Will it bloom this year?” It is the agonizing question of an inhabitant of the “Waste Land”: are we to see a Resurrection? So far, everything is clear. But who is this Stetson, whom we meet in a busy city street in London? He was, the poet (or Tiresias) tells us, once with him at Mylae—on the occasion of the destruction of the Carthaginian fleet in 260 b.c. And we shall meet him again in the third part of the poem under the name of

Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants
C.i.f. London.

and then again in Part IV:

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
                                                                                A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
                                                                                Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

And in the hearing of the sensitive reader the note will be picked up and continued as “You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”

I have tried to isolate, in as few words as possible, the main leitmotiv of the poem, that of the dead god. And all the inhabitants of the “Waste Land” are, in their own way, identified with the dead god and Phlebas the Carthaginian, Stetson, Mr. Eugenides and the others whom I have not mentioned, as You! hypocrite reader!—my fellow man—my brother!

It was this, just now, that Cavafy was telling us. He was telling us not to be self-satisfied, not to fool ourselves with the belief that our life, our tidy and calculated life, is somehow out of reach of the spectacular and of the terrible. We are all inhabitants of the “waste land”—you and I and everybody who has some consciousness of evil and of catastrophe. The dead god is no forgotten fairy tale but rather something deep inside us, something identified with this very present moment, with ourselves. And, in poetry, Eliot arrives at this point by the use of that very same feeling for historical time which we have observed in Cavafy.

This way of using time, so important in the work of both poets, is already underlined by Eliot in the observations which he makes on James Joyce's Ulysses. “In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. It is a method already adumbrated by Mr. Yeats, and of the need for which I believe Mr. Yeats to have been the first contemporary to be conscious.”

I think that I can legitimately maintain that this method is not only adumbrated, but is systematically employed by Cavafy long before the appearance of Ulysses and Joyce, and long before Yeats also.

“I am a historical poet,” Cavafy said towards the end of his life. “I could never write a novel or a play; but I hear inside me a hundred and twenty-five voices telling me that I could write history.”

Like most fragments of ordinary conversation, this phrase has no very precise meaning. However, I think that “historical poet” does not mean a poet who is also a historian. If the word “poet” has any meaning at all, it must mean a man who has this kind of feeling for history, this historical perception, which we have been examining in this essay.

3

We will look rather more closely at this phrase of Cavafy's later. Just now I should like to comment upon certain criticisms which have been made on the lines I have already quoted. These criticisms concern, and eventually condemn, the use of so much learning, so many historical and other references in the composition of a poem. As for Eliot, this subject has been dealt with thoroughly already. In considering Cavafy I shall use as a starting point the opinions of some literary critics who have no sympathy at all for his method. That most industrious of all commentators on Cavafy's life and work, Mr. Timos Malanos, observes: “He introduces into his verse phrases borrowed from elsewhere, even untranslated quotations of whole passages from ancient texts, thus behaving not like a poet, but like the writer of an academic paper.”

And in order to show us how bad this habit of Cavafy's is, he takes some passages from the old lexicon known as Suidas and uses them to parody Cavafy's style. The point could be a just one. Cavafy might be a Suidas in verse, just as Eliot might be a Sir James Frazer in verse, were it not for the sensibility with which each of these poets is endowed. It is through his sensibility that the poet is recognized. Intellect, learning, logical acuteness are for him very important things, but sensibility is the cornerstone for everything. As Eliot says in another context, “It is the sensuous contribution to the intelligence that makes the difference.”

This is the important thing. And there is, I think, very definitely a common characteristic in the sensibilities of Eliot and of Cavafy. Eliot notes and emphasizes this point in the work of the poets of the late Elizabethan period, of the metaphysical poets and of his contemporaries: “There is a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a re-creation of thought into feeling.” He is constantly pointing out that in all major poets of the time of Donne there was no dichotomy between the experience of life and the experience of learning, that what these poets derived from books—from Plutarch, Seneca, Montaigne—and what they derived from their own personal lives are not kept separate, but are pulsating together in the same living bloodstream.

It is just the same with Cavafy. We have only to think of one of his best known poems, “The God Abandons Antony,” and Plutarch; of “Demetrius Soter” and Polybius; of “If Dead Indeed” and Eusebius. His mind hears the beloved voices in his thought. His “art of poetry” amounts to: “Attempts to numb the pain, in Imagination and Word.”

I should, I think, emphasize the use of the words “mind,” “thought,” “word” in their reference to what is pure emotion. The poem “Caesarion” is a fine example of how for Cavafy thinking is feeling; and “Caesarion” comes into existence through “a small and trivial passage” in an obscure work of history.

“It is probable,” Eliot writes, “that men ripen best through experiences which are at once sensuous and intellectual; certainly many men will admit that their keenest ideas have come to them with the quality of a sense perception, and that their keenest sensuous experience has been as if the body thought.”

I think that it would be difficult to deny that here we have just the same type of sensibility as that which we find in Cavafy—a blending, an indissoluble mixture of feeling, learning and thinking. This is the basic characteristic of unity in his work, and it is just this that is missing in Suidas.

“Two poems of mine were shipwrecked because I could not find a copy of Gregory Nazianzen,” Cavafy used to say to his friends. And why not? The question is not what sort of books a poet reads, but whether he can bring about a transfusion of himself into the material from which he is going to make his poems. And this is something that can be observed, not in his method, but only in his actual work. There is a remark of Rémy de Gourmont which, I should imagine, must have meant much to Eliot: “Flaubert incorporated all his sensitivity in his work. Apart from his books, he is of very little interest.” This phrase should be applied in its entirety to Cavafy, if we want to understand him. In a life span of seventy years he did nothing else but distill himself, drop by drop, into his hundred and fifty or so poems:

Environment of house, of city centers, city quarters,
Which I look upon and where I walk; year after year
I have created you in the midst of joy and in the midst of sorrows:
With so many circumstances, so many things.
And you have been made into sensation, the whole of you, for me.

[In the Same Space]

“The craftsman, since he puts his work before everything else, must destroy himself for the sake of his work”—so Cavafy used to say, according to one of his critics. There are two ways in which we can examine the personal life of an artist: one is by means of anecdotes, surprises, jokes, medical reports; the other is by humbly trying to see how the poet incorporates his perishable life in his work. For those who prefer the first way, my words may have very little significance; I prefer the second, and this is why I say that Cavafy, apart from his poetry, has no great interest.

But, one may ask, if Cavafy is incorporating his sensibility in his poetry, why is he so arid? Why does his verse not have, as some have complained, “the ring of a hymn, why does it not sing, why does it not throb with passion? Why is it a versification of the intellect?” And it is perfectly true that Cavafy does not sing and does not throb with passion; he seems indeed fully conscious of his idiosyncrasy, which is, as we have seen, to think with the senses. His critics go on to say, “Cavafy's method is always to use the most frugal and anti-poetic phrase for the expression of his poetic ideas.” He is “the implacable enemy of any kind of decoration.” And, worst of all, “With the passing of the years he became accustomed to a facile and continuous increase in the use of the prosaic element,” like “one who, always a heavy drinker, has continually to increase the daily dose.”

There is no doubt of the fact that “Cavafy stands at the boundary where poetry strips herself in order” (as I have said elsewhere) “to become prose.” No one has ever gone further in this direction. He is the most anti-poetic (or a-poetic) poet I know—if, that is, one measures and defines the poetic by the aims and the work of Solomos. Naturally, if we look at things in this way, we shall have to arrive in the end at the conclusion that “Cavafy betrayed poetry.”

However, it is very dangerous to use one poet for measuring another. If we like Solomos (and I am devoted to him) we should look for him in his own work and in the work of those whom he helped to express themselves. Not where he does not exist. And in Cavafy Solomos does not exist. Cavafy belongs to an entirely different Greek tradition—a colossal tradition and one that is much more arrogant than that other one, the one that was looked down upon and which Solomos tried to grab hold of with both his hands, which failed him in the task. Cavafy's tradition, the scholarly tradition, rests upon a tremendous weight of literature; however, in all its thousand years of existence (if we put aside the church hymns) it has not been able to produce poetry like that of Solomos, and, like Cavafy, it has not been able to communicate feelings.

Cavafy has this tradition in the very marrow of his bones, so deeply that although in his early work he tried to shake it off, he still kept it, and ended by trying to put life into it by the transfusion of his own blood. We have, of course, to shape our material; but at the same time our material shapes us. Cavafy's material is dry, prosaic, sentimentally neutral, abstract. In these respects it is the exact opposite of the material used by Solomos. Solomos and Cavafy follow courses which lead in opposite directions; they start from antipodes; they are the antipodes that form the limits of the immense horizon in the literary landscape of our small country. The material of Solomos is bursting with life, untamed, full of color, vigor, instinct; and with this material he struggles incessantly with the knowledge, the sagacity and the discipline of a great European; he struggles to bring it under the control of the exactitude and order of a higher form of expression. Cavafy, on the other hand, is dealing with a material that has grown old in monasteries and libraries, and he tries to incarnate through his own body (let us not laugh at him; perhaps Lysias the Grammarian is his most pathetic character) this matter which is as wholly devoid of feeling as is the empty shell of a cicada, but which conserves the wisdom and the old technique of the movement of speech and of accuracy. These are the two diametrically opposite ways followed by Solomos and by Cavafy. However, earth is a sphere, and perhaps they have already met.

The only things, then, which this tradition brought to Cavafy were abstract motions and the forms of accuracy. It was a choreography without a dancer; the dancer must be provided by Cavafy himself. His tradition, to which he had to remain true, provided him with no material for hymns, songs, heartthrobs. It was—if one wants to look at it in this way—full of exclamations, but these exclamations were all hollow, sounds and noises with no human voice behind them. Working in this tradition and with his own idiosyncrasy, Cavafy could not possibly force exclamations from his lips, he could not possibly be lyrical. But there are other forms in which poetry can exist—in the expression of human activity, for instance. “What great poetry is not dramatic?” Eliot asks. “Even the minor writers of the Greek Anthology, even Martial, are dramatic. Who is more dramatic than Homer or Dante? We are human beings and in what are we more interested than in human action and human attitudes?”³

In this sense of “dramatic” (the reader has, perhaps, noted the mention of the Greek Anthology) Cavafy too is dramatic. In another essay⁴ Eliot writes, “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately invoked.”

This “objective correlative” of Eliot can lead us far. Let us see how it can be applied to Cavafy. What Eliot is saying I imagine, is that in order to be able to express his emotion the poet has to find a setting of situations, a framework of events, a form-type, which will be like the sights of a rifle; when the senses are ‘sighted’ in this way they will find themselves directed at the particular emotion. The framework of events in the Odyssey, the Divine Comedy, or Antony and Cleopatra, for example (and I mean not only the plot of these works, but also, and mainly, the psychology and pattern of behavior of their characters) is the “objective correlative” of the special emotion which Homer, Dante, or Shakespeare wish to express; the objective correlative is a tool of accuracy.

Cavafy seems to be constantly using this method; and as the years pass, he seems to reject altogether the unframed expression of emotion. He goes even further; he not only insists on the agility of his characters, the lapidary quality of his events, and the clarity of his historical perceptions which form his own “objective correlative,” but he also seems to erase, to neutralize, all other kinds of emotive expression either by the robustness of the language or by the use of other poetic modes, imageries, comparisons or transpositions. This is another reason why Cavafy has been called graceless and prosaic.

Very often in Cavafy's work, while the language itself is neutral and unemotional, the movement of the persons and the succession of the events involved is so closely packed, so airtight, one might almost say, that one has the impression that his poems breathe emotion through a vacuum. This vacuum created by Cavafy is the element which differentiates his phrases from the mere prosaicness which his critics have fancied that they saw in his work. Petros Vlastos,⁵ who dislikes Cavafy almost as much as he dislikes Eliot, writes that his poems are “like pedestals without the statues.” If one leaves out of account the implied derision, I should say that this is not a bad description. Often Cavafy's poems reveal the emotion that we should have felt at the sight of a statue which is no longer there; it was there, there where we once saw it, there in the place from which it has now been removed. But they do reveal the emotion. Maybe this “absence of the statue” is the greatest difficulty in Cavafy, but when he writes in this way I admire him more than in those early halftoned whisperings of a kind of youthful aestheticism. Consider the following as an example of his later manner:

Successful and entirely satisfied,
the King Alexander Jannaeus
and his consort the Queen Alexandra,
preceded by a fanfare of music, pass with
all kinds of splendor and luxury
through the streets of Jerusalem.
The work undertaken by Judas Maccabaeus
and his four illustrious brothers,
and continued later with such dogged resolve,
amid perils and many difficulties,
has succeeded magnificently.
Now nothing inappropriate remains.
All submission to the arrogant monarchs
of Antioch has ceased. Look,
the King Alexander Jannaeus
and his consort the Queen Alexandra
are equal in all to the Seleucids.
Good Jews, pure Jews, faithful Jews—above all.
But, as circumstances require it,
they are also masters of the Greek vernacular;
and they associate with Greeks and hellenized
monarchs—as equals, however, and that goes without saying.
The work undertaken by the great Judas Maccabaeus
and his four illustrious brothers
has truly succeeded magnificently,
has succeeded remarkably.

[Alexander Jannaeus and Alexandra]

This is the pedestal: a king and his queen “successful,” “entirely satisfied,” conscious of their power and rank, loyal to their race and creed, proud of having continued the work of their ancestors. Their state is secure; the beautiful procession now going through the streets of Jerusalem is an impressive symbol of sovereignty. Everything is successful, healthy, prosperous. Now, what is the statue that is missing?

In another of his poems Cavafy depicts Nero, sleeping in his palace, unconscious, quiet, happy, prosperous, while his Lares (his domestic gods), terror-struck, listen to the oncoming footsteps of the avenging Erinyes. Should we not ask ourselves whether, in this poem too, there may be Lares listening to such iron footsteps? Whether, perhaps, the poet expects us, the readers, to be the Lares and to hear the Erinyes? Cavafy has told us: “Seldom, if ever, do I make use of emphasis.” When we do encounter it, it should certainly mean something. It did not come there by chance or through a kind of lyrical transport.

Now it is easy to see where the emphasis is in this poem. We have only to look at the repetitions. They highlight two points: the race of Judah and the struggle of the Maccabees to make their country free and independent. These two points mark the deception, for what is happening is just the opposite.

The conquest, the great Diaspora, the persecution, the endless agony of the Jews are there, muttering in their sleep, as if dreaming of Alexander Jannaeus and of his Queen and of the great Judas Maccabaeus and his four illustrious brothers, all of whom will dissolve just like dreams as soon as, in a very few years, Destruction awakes. The missing statue is Destruction.

People have spoken of the humor of Cavafy. I think that what humor he has may be something he retained from his early childhood, when, we are told, until he reached the age of nine the only language he spoke was English. it is that type of humor—the least comprehensible element in the English language—which is expressed by the untranslatable word “nonsense,” as we find it in Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear—an impassive, cold sort of jocularity, which sounds idiotic to clever people, something that creates an intellectual vacuum. For instance, Lewis Carroll's Alice talks in a wood with two strange and toylike figures. They point out to her the Red King asleep under a tree: “He's dreaming now,” said Tweedledee, “and what do you think he's dreaming about?”—Alice said, “Nobody can guess that.”—“Why, about you!” Tweedledee exclaimed. … “And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you'd be?”—“Where I am, of course,” said Alice.—“Not you! … You'd be nowhere. Why you're only a sort of thing in his dream!”—“If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you'd go out—bang!—just like a candle!”

So Cavafy's poems often give us the impression that somebody who is not exactly there, but who nevertheless exists, will very soon wake up and then everything will be overturned.

What comes after this I do not know. From this point everyone must proceed in his own way. If poetry were not deeply rooted in our bodies and in our world, it would be a short-lived thing. To stop short at this point, it would have had to be a short-lived thing. We do not know the end of poetry.

4

And now, after this long parenthesis, let us look back at that phrase of Cavafy's: “I am a historical poet.” I said that this could only mean that he is a poet with a certain kind of feeling for history. On this point Eliot has some very definite ideas. Let us consider some of the most characteristic of these.

For Eliot “the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence”; and it “compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with the feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.” So far from being an indolent absorption in the tepid waters of old ways and manners, it is “what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.”⁶

I do not know what Cavafy's views were about his own contemporary world nor about the value of man in general. But when I look at his work I cannot help observing that his poetic conscience behaves as if it were in agreement with these views which have just been expressed; his historical sense not only makes him eminently contemporary, but also provides him with just the same method. The permanent element that is endlessly stressed by Cavafy—so much so that it becomes a kind of basic code in his poems—is deception, derision. The panorama unfolded by his poems is a world of dupes and swindlers. Ever since his early years (when in a poem later suppressed he wrote, “O wretched lyre, victim of every kind of deceit”), ever since his first poems (in one of which he shows Apollo deceiving Thetis like a common scoundrel), up to the very last verse he wrote (“… let him babble. / The important thing is that he nearly burst with rage”), his whole work presents a web of trickeries, traps, ruses, machinations, fears, suspicions, faulty reckonings, mistaken expectations, vain efforts. His gods mock, deride and jeer, his characters are deceitful and at the same time mere playthings in the hands of the gods, of time, of fate, of luck, “a bone thrown to puppies, a crust of bread in a fishpond, an ant's hardships and drudgery, scurrying of mice, puppets moved by strings.”⁷

There is no saving faith, only a faith in art, and this serves as a kind of narcotic elixir in the general betrayal, where we find spun round in the dreadful vortex the noble resignation of a few elderly ladies and a bitter devotion to the great race and tradition of the Greeks. Everything is “in part … in part.”

Cavafy's world exists in the twilight zones, in the borderlands of those places, individuals and epochs which he so painstakingly identifies. It is an area marked by blending, amalgamation, transition, alteration, exceptions; the cities that glow and flicker—Antioch, Alexandria, Sidon, Seleucia, Osroene, Commagene; a hermaphroditic world where even the language spoken is an alloy. And his much publicized eroticism either takes on the behavior of a condemned person, growing old in prison, who, with a fierce insistence, tattoos erotic scenes upon his skin, or else it is diluted among a multitude of dead people and their epitaphs. The tomb of Eurion, the tomb of the Grammarian Lysias, the tomb of Iases, the tomb of Ignatius, the tomb of Lanes; Leucios, Ammones, Myres, Marylos—and so many others. There are so many dead and they are so much alive that we are unable to distinguish them from the men we saw a minute ago, as we were walking in the street, standing at the door of the café, sitting by a casino table, or working in an ironsmith's shop. His “vain, vain love,” his barren love is unable to leave anything behind except a mortuary statue, typically beautiful, a cinnamon-brown suit, frayed and discolored, tragically alive, as though fallen from time's saddlebags. This is Cavafy's panorama. All these things together make up the experience of his sensibility—uniform, contemporary, simultaneous, expressed by his historical sense. If I did not think of him in this way, I should not be able to understand him at all; put out of this perspective, To Antiochus Epiphanes, for instance, would have seemed to me simply ridiculous:

The young man of Antioch          said to the King,
“A beloved hope pulses          in the depths of my heart;
once more the Macedonians,          Antiochus Epiphanes,
the Macedonians are                    involved in the major
                                                            struggle.
If only they would
                    triumph—          I would willingly give
anyone the lion and the
                              horses,          the Pan of coral,
and the elegant palace,                    and the Tyrian gardens,
and all else you have given
                              me,          Antiochus Epiphanes.”
Perhaps for a brief moment          the King was a little moved.
But at once he remembered          his father and brother,
and he did not even reply.          An eavesdropper might go
and repeat something.—          Besides, as was natural,
the horrible ending                    came quite suddenly at
                                                            Pydna.

So much for the historical sense of the old poet of Alexandria. One must own that though he has employed it among innumerable forms and though he has entrusted to death the key, he transmits to us the taste of a kind of horror. Eliot too has seen something of this horror.

5

However, Eliot is very different from Cavafy, in the hierarchy of his values, in his technique, in his particular use of language and in the tone of his voice. He comes from another race. Sprung from a line of puritans, he sets out from America, at that time still provincial in matters of literature, to discover the workshops of the old world. For him tradition is not a matter of inheritance; if you want it, you must work hard to acquire it. An Englishman would not feel like this. But Eliot comes from a rootless place, a place without a past. He feels strongly how paper-thin, how groundless, how unreal and anarchic is, in fact, the order offered by the mechanical civilization of today, his inheritance of material good. He is aware of the drying up of the sources of inspiration. He has given himself up, both by inclination and in accord with the tenets of his own tradition, to the examination of conscience; he audits and he evaluates. Life, for him, is not pleasure; indeed, for Eliot pleasure has something in it of sarcasm; it gives the impression of a bruised fruit, a wound in a tender body. For him the element which makes mankind alive is the struggle between good and evil. He sees a world that is losing its principle of existence, that is dying out just because this struggle is sinking down into apathetic vulgarity. From this feeling comes the symbol of “the waste land,” and those going to and fro there, in the words of Dante, fece per viltà il gran rifiuto—they are the people who never lived, because they denied both good and evil. Refused even by Hell, they cannot pass over Acheron; they are dead and neutral to the end of time.

It is in Europe that Eliot finds his tradition, the French Symbolists and Jules Laforgue, to whom he is so much indebted; the English Elizabethans and Jacobeans, the metaphysical poets and John Donne; the Mediterranean and Dante. With his religious instinct and his conscious decision to give himself to something beyond and above himself, with an amazing concentration of his own sensibility, he goes steadily forward in the production of a work that is superbly organized. He is a rare example of a poet who feels, thinks, struggles with himself, and develops a self-disciplined, almost mystical devotion to his work.

Cavafy is something different. He comes from one of the intellectual capitals of the world which, though almost submerged, is still great and can boast of being “Greek from ages past”: from Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, the Phanar; from the capital of an intellectual fatherland which is marked by innumerable graves, but is still immense; her frontiers are far-flung and extend deep into “Bactria, as far as the Indias”; of this immensity he is the last inhabitant. When he was twelve years old or so, he set himself the task of composing a historical dictionary. He abandoned it after writing down what was for him the fateful word—Alexander. The “common language of the Greeks” which he inherited and came to develop “like an eavesdropper” is the language of the great masters of Hellenism. He is their last heir.

Cavafy is not burdened by the absence of a tradition. On the contrary, what he feels is the dead weight of a tradition which is thousands of years old and which he has done nothing to acquire, since he “carries in him” this “glorious” literate tradition of the Greeks. He is the solitary of an extreme period of Hellenism, the period of the twentieth century. We may compare him with Synesius in the fifth century a.d., bishop of Ptolemais, admirer of Homer, friend of Hypatia, who was baptized on the same day as he was made bishop; or with the archbishop Michael Choniates in the twelfth century, lamenting over the ancient glories of Athens. So in this boundless country surrounded by “great and high walls” he goes forward, treading with his sensitive feet upon “faces of the dead.” And the whole question is whether the graves will suck him down or whether he will be able to bring to life with his own blood even so much as a single dry twig in this dead garden—a thing that, for a thousand years before him, no one has yet done in this tradition.

This duality, or division, in Cavafy is something innate. He does not come across it as he grows; he started with it and from it. He does not try to repress it; instead he looks for a way of bringing it together as he gradually develops, “almost imperceptibly,” in accordance with his own way, his inner nature, his particular sincerity. In Cavafy we shall not find the presence of a world conscience, the anguished questionings, the disciplined struggle that we observe in Eliot. The shade and color of his world, of the contemporary world, is seen by Cavafy in an intuitive way. And the symbols of his “waste land” may be found without going back to forgotten myths; they are inside him; they are himself. For in the ultimate analysis of his poetry only two symbols are left: the dead Adonis who is not restored to life—the sterile Adonis, and Proteus, old, exhausted and sick—the “Fisher-King,” who can no longer take on different shapes, and who asks from the magicians of the East herbs and distilled potions to dull the pain of his wound. But in the kingdom of the Alexandrian there is no “pure Knight” to symbolize the fight between good and evil. We have seen how Eliot used the verse of Dante: Che fece per viltà il gran rifiuto. This same verse provided Cavafy with the opportunity (before, it is true, he had found the direction in which he was to go) of writing his most popular poem, which is also, in my view, his least successful. Perhaps it is his only poem where he does not pay attention to his words. He places in opposition, with some grandiloquence and with the use of capital letters, “the great Yes” and “the great No”—terms which here neither lead to nor start from any reality. But the problems of the puritans are very rarely problems for Greeks, and Eliot might have seemed to Cavafy just another Julian the Apostate, Julian the puritan, the most derided figure who appears in his work.

The distance separating Eliot and Cavafy is enormous. However, this Phanariot, who at the beginning appears to have no talent for poetry at all, and yet who, like a true poet, perseveres until he becomes “true to himself,” gradually discarding everything that does not belong to him, gave us, in his own particular manner and perhaps unconsciously (like a natural ripening of growth), with the aid of the images of his ancestral coat of arms, his own poetical expression of “the waste land.” The invocation of the resurrection of the dead god which he wrote towards the end of his life is to me one of the most beautiful passages in the Greek language:

“What extract can be discovered from
witching herbs,” said an aesthete,
“what extract prepared according to the
formulas of ancient Grecosyrian magi
that, for a day (if its potency
can last no longer), or even an hour,
can evoke for me my twenty-three years. …”

[According to Ancient Formulas of Greco-Syrian Magi]

“Eliot has been criticized,” I have written elsewhere, “for leaving his reader in a dry, sterile and waterless waste land, alone, and with no hope of salvation. There might be some point in this if Eliot had not created any poetry. Because poetry, however marked by despair, saves us, in some way or other, from the tumult of our passions.”

I should say the same thing about Cavafy. The job of a poet is not to solve philosophical or social problems; it is to offer us poetic catharsis by means of his passions and his thoughts, which are concerned both with his inner self and with the world outside him, as is becoming to a living man with his share in this world. Cavafy, as I see him, lying stranded, as he is, in the net of the dead god, gives us this poetical catharsis out of his spiritual heritage, out of his foreknowledge of the world, out of his buried secret, and out of the logic of his personality. However, from his “waste land,” as from that of Eliot, there is no exit. The problem remains, and to solve it one would have to change many things in the life of the world we live in. But that is another matter.

This ecumenical problem, in its various forms and its various reactions, goes very deep and marks very deeply the living literature of our times. It is also expressed, as I have attempted to show, by the poetry of Cavafy, Cavafy the grammarian, if we look at him, “with a searching soul,” that is to say a soul which cannot but be part of the world we live in. Artemidorus also was a grammarian. But if Caesar had read what he had written down, things would have been different:

                    As you go out on the street,
a man of authority conspicuous with your followers,
if by some chance out of the mob some Artemidorus
should approach you, who brings you a letter,
and hastily says, “Read this at once,
it contains grave matters of concern to you,”
do not fail to stop; do not fail to put off
all talk or work; do not fail to turn away
the various people who salute you and kneel before you
(you can see them later); let even the Senate
itself wait, and immediately get to know
the grave writings of Artemidorus.

[The Ides of March]

The “grave writings” of Artemidorus, of Cavafy, of Eliot, of Flaubert. “If at least they had understood Education Sentimentale,” said Flaubert, looking at the ruins of the Tuileries, in the strife-torn Paris of the Commune, “this would not have happened.” Flaubert must have been a naïve man in politics. And in any case, as Gourmont said, Flaubert, who was distilling himself drop by drop into his books, is of no interest to us apart from his works. I would say the same thing of Cavafy. I said this before and now I will correct the statement by saying that outside his poems Cavafy does not exist. As it seems to me, one of two things will happen: either we shall continue to write scholastic gossip about his private life, fastening upon the bons mots of provincial witticisms; and then, of course, we shall reap what we have sown; or else, starting from his basic characteristic, his unity, we shall listen to what is actually said by his work, this work in which, drop by drop, he spent his own self, with all his senses. And after having done this, we might attempt to place him and to feel him within the framework of the Greek tradition, the whole tradition, indivisible as it is. For this tradition is not, as some see it, an affair of isolated promontories, some great names, some illuminating texts; instead it is like what others of us see and feel in the little mosaics of a humble Byzantine church—the Ionian philosophers, the popular verses of the period of the Comneni, the epigrams of the Anthology, Greek folk song, Aeschylus, Palamas, Solomos, Sikelianos, Calvos, Cavafy, the Parthenon, Homer, all living in a moment of time, in this Europe of today and looking at our devastated homes. With this point of view Cavafy will not seem to us alien; rather we shall find him slowly and mysteriously becoming one with his own kind (though not with the grammarians and the sophists), becoming more and more closely united, more and more integrated with our living tradition, like Myres, changed and confirmed by time, “dealer in souls.”

Notes

1. I am indebted to Mr. G. P. Savides for showing me that T. S. Eliot was not unknown to Cavafy. This appears from two letters (August 1, 1924 and October 15, 1929) written by Cavafy to E. M. Forster.

2. In the edition of 1926 Cavafy was careful to indicate, “First Printing: February 2, 1922.”

3. A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry.

4. Hamlet.

5. Essayist, critic and scholar (1879-1941).

6. Tradition and the Individual Talent.

7. Marcus Aurelius. Meditations 7.3.

The greater part of this essay was given in the form of a lecture at the British Institute, Athens, on December 17, 1946.